Noam Hassenfeld

That is a form of tinnitus.

That's temporary tinnitus.

And it usually goes away.

When she went to get her hearing checked, her audiologist told her her hearing was fine, like she fully passed this hearing test.

And that made her feel so crazy, right?

She had this thing that was forcing her to pull away from everything in her life, and the doctor saying, your hearing is fine.

Yeah, so this is what I found so fascinating about this recent research that's been going on.

This is research that Stefan was doing at Mass Eye and Ear in Boston.

It's something called hidden hearing loss.

Basically...

In your ear, there's fibers that respond to soft sounds and there's fibers that respond to loud sounds.

So that means there's fibers that respond to whispers or kind of the ASMR stuff.

And then there's fibers that really get activated if you're crossing the street or near an airplane or a vacuum cleaner or something.

And on a hearing test, what they do is they put you in this soundproof room.

The audiologist sits next to you, says, raise your hand whenever you can hear a beep.

And the beep gets softer and softer and softer until you can't hear the beep.

And what they're doing is just testing the soft fibers.

They're just testing if you can hear the quietest possible noise.

And if you can hear the quietest possible noise, they say, hey, your hearing's fine.

But that doesn't test damage that could happen to the loud fibers.