Noam Hassenfeld

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.

Like when I was speaking to Stefan, he told me he had tinnitus.

And he was like, and actually it's way worse than normal right now because we've been talking about it for an hour and it's really annoying.

I mean, honestly, it really, really does.

It's so frustrating.

The best way that is available right now for treating tinnitus...

does seem to be something like mindfulness.

I look at the example of Kelly.

She said, okay, I was using these maskers before, but I'm trying not to use the maskers anymore.

I'm trying to let my brain hear the entire world again.

You know, she told me she went to go see fireworks and at first the fireworks were like really upsetting and scary and she kind of got used to it.

And that's not to say it's been easy.

That's not to say her tinnitus is gone.