Noam Hassenfeld

She couldn't sleep.

The thing that makes tinnitus so hard to pin down is that it isn't a sound out there in the world.

It is literally just in your head, but it's also real, especially for people like Kelly.

I'm Noam Hassenfeld, and this is the second episode of The Sound Barrier, a series from Unexplainable about the limits of hearing and the ways we can break through.

On today's episode, how can our brain make us hear sounds that don't exist?

Okay, before you go into this, just a question.

How do you pronounce this word?

A couple weeks ago, I met Stéphane Maison at Mass Eye and Ear, a hospital in Boston.

Stéphane's the director of the tinnitus clinic there, which he launched last year.

It was also a way to potentially help his own hearing.

You do?

Yeah.

What does it sound like?

So do you hear a pitch right now?

You've probably also had at least a brief moment of tinnitus before.

Basically, your hearing gets damaged, which means one part of your brain is getting less auditory information than it expects.

So another part starts to overcompensate.

It's kind of like a climate control system.

You have it set to 70 degrees or something, and if it gets too cold, the heat will kick on.

So when the brain suddenly isn't getting the same level of sound it's expecting from the outside world...