Noam Hassenfeld

One of the researchers I talked to, Dan Polley, who's also at Mass Eye and Ear, he said it's basically like a climate control system in your brain.

And then the temperature goes down, you know, 68, whatever.

The heat's going to kick on.

Now, what happens in your brain is your brain is kind of doing a similar thing for sound, but when some of the nerve fibers are damaged, you're getting less input than the brain would expect.

And so it's kind of like turning on the heat, so to speak, but it can't get the sound that it needs.

So it kind of creates its own sound to fill in that gap.

Stefan told me it's almost like a form of phantom limb syndrome, where you might have had your leg amputated.

Now your brain is no longer getting the nerve input from your leg or your foot.

But it is kind of like creating the sensation it expects to feel.

And in a lot of ways, that's often what's happening with tinnitus.

This is what I find so fascinating because it just seems like it's this like curse, right?

Why would our brain do something so torturous to us?

Why would it make up a sound that would keep us up at night?

But it turns out, I found out in reporting this series, that this is actually kind of the tip of the iceberg of the way our brain hears the world.

And it's kind of the dark side of a superpower that allows us to even hear the world to begin with.

The one thing I didn't know until I opened the box the first time is that AG1 actually needs to be refrigerated after it's been opened.

It makes sense.

It's because of the live probiotics and the real whole food sourced ingredients in the package.

And I just like that idea of knowing what I'm drinking is actually doing its job in supporting better gut health because it's alive.

All right, so, tinnitus is your brain constructing a sound when it's not getting the input it expects.