Noam Hassenfeld

So all in all, it's been helpful, but it's far from perfect.

And Stefan isn't really a huge fan of stuff like this to begin with.

Stefan says that even though a masker is designed to blend the tinnitus noise in with the background, it ends up becoming the majority of what people are actually hearing.

In his experience, masking noise just ends up reminding patients all the time that they still have tinnitus.

And the more you think about tinnitus, the worse it can get.

For some people with mild tinnitus, a Band-Aid like this can be useful from time to time.

But for people like Kelly with severe tinnitus, it's a lot more complicated.

I wanted to be able to go back to Kelly with some useful information, but I wasn't really sure what I was going to be able to tell her until I talked to Dan Polley.

Dan's a tinnitus researcher who also has tinnitus, like Stefan, and apparently a whole bunch of tinnitus researchers, as I found out.

Dan also works at Mass Eye and Ear, and he focuses on how different parts of the brain work together to generate the tinnitus sound.

Dan told me there's a pretty fundamental difference between the mild tinnitus he has and the severe tinnitus that people like Kelly have.

You're saying when some people are obsessed and can't function because they're tinnitus, it's not because they just hate the sound.

It's because...

That sound has gotten into their brain system and like infected their brain?

For people with severe tinnitus, Dan says things like mindfulness therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy can act on these other brain areas and hopefully tamp down the tinnitus.

Yeah, so it's been almost a year since we talked.

How are you doing?

And you feel like you're slowly chiseling through it?

I told Kelly what Dan had said about people with severe tinnitus, how it's not like they're just being weak, that they might have a whole brain problem, that their tinnitus has basically expanded across their brain networks and hooked into the parts of their brain that influence other things, like their emotions.

It's going to be a long process.