Noam Hassenfeld

And you can see what happens to people who have damage to loud fibers if you're in a restaurant and notice that you can't understand the person across from you.

It might be loud, might be in a bar or something.

But if you're in a quiet room, you'll have no problem hearing the conversation.

What's happening there is you have damage in your louder fibers, and that damage is not gonna show up on a hearing test.

But that damage could lead to tinnitus.

That's the type of hidden hearing loss that could end up leading to tinnitus.

I mean, come on.

Like, we don't need a scientist to tell us they need to turn the music down at a restaurant.

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?