Noam Hassenfeld

Where the drummer loses hearing, he gets a cochlear implant, and then everything sounds metallic and robotic and glitchy.

Amazing movie.

But what this guy Mike did is that he practiced and he retrained his brain to listen to music.

He really wanted to listen to his favorite piece of music, Bolero.

to test out new hearing aids.

And he practiced listening over and over again.

He remembered what it sounded like and he retrained his brain so that it sounded less robotic and metallic.

And he told me that he can listen to Bolero again and really enjoy it.

He actually retrained his brain.

He used this superpower.

It is not that simple.

Tinnitus usually comes from hearing damage, and it's really difficult to figure out the best way to fix that.

There are some people out there thinking about trying to actually fix the damaged fibers, like regrow their connections with a protein called neurotrophin.

There's another scientist I talked to who's trying to retrain individual neurons using the sense of touch, which is really cool, like playing a tinnitus sound and then putting an electrode on the spine and kind of trying to activate the individual neurons when that sound is coming in.

Kelly tried something different.

She tried to do something called masking, which is listening to kind of white noise or pink noise or brown noise that's sort of at the same frequency as her tinnitus.

You know, kind of like sleeping with a fan on to drown out traffic noise or something.

And it did help her a bit.

But some of the researchers I spoke to don't love that idea because it can make you constantly be thinking about the tinnitus even more.

And one of the things that can actually make tinnitus worse is thinking about it.