Chapter 1: What is tinnitus and how does it affect people?
Hi, shortwavers. Emily Kwong here, and we have a special episode for you from one of the best science podcasts out there, Unexplainable from Vox. Unexplainable digs into scientific mysteries and unanswered questions about everything from dark matter and black holes to what dinosaurs may have sounded like. And
Last year, host Noam Hassenfeld did a five-part series about the way our brains process sound. It's called The Sound Barrier, and their second episode is about tinnitus. That's when you perceive a ringing in your ear, this persistent sound that comes from nowhere. Almost 15% of adults suffer from this, and there is no cure. In fact, researchers are only just beginning to understand the cause.
Here's that piece, and you can check out the rest of The Sound Barrier series on the unexplainable podcast. podcast feed. Enjoy.
I noticed it around just New Year's time. I just remember there was something on the bright side of my ear going on. It's like, do-do, do-do, do-do. And I thought it was just the pipes. I kept asking my fiance if he's been hearing something going on in the walls next to me, but he's reported back nothing.
Kelly started hearing things almost four years ago, just a couple months after her 25th birthday. At first, she wasn't sure what was going on. She did the WebMD thing. She Googled all her symptoms. She got worried. When she told her family, they told her to relax. But the sound didn't stop. And pretty soon, she started hearing something in her other ear.
It's like the high-pitched ringing you usually hear in your ear every now and then, but it's, like, more intense, and it's just there the whole time.
Wow, so different sounds right in left ear.
Yeah.
Eventually, Kelly decided she needed to get her hearing checked.
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Chapter 2: Why do people with tinnitus often have normal hearing tests?
And because normal hearing tests don't focus on loud fibers, that damage stayed hidden. And if your loud fibers get damaged, you're not going to have any issues having a conversation in a quiet room. You're not going to have any issues on your hearing test. But if you go somewhere like a bar or a restaurant, you might find that you suddenly can't make out what your friend is saying.
And if you look at most people, that's something very, very common. They feel like they don't have any issues in a quiet environment, but as soon as they go to a bar or a restaurant, they start to struggle.
So Stefan took his patients with normal hearing test scores, and instead of giving them that classic hearing test again, he gave them a different one focused on loud fibers.
Instead of testing them in quiet, it's as if someone was speaking super fast with a little bit of reverberation.
Like he suspected, a lot of them really struggled with the louder, echoey conversations because they had hidden hearing loss. They had damage to their loud fibers. And Stefan had a feeling that hidden hearing loss could be the thing causing his patients that had normal hearing test scores to have tinnitus. So we ran a different test.
He placed tiny electrodes inside their ear canals and he played them a sound. A click. He recorded the electrical responses from that sound. And that's going to show you different types of waveforms. It's basically a squiggly line that shows neurons firing as a sound signal gets processed by the brain.
And when he looked at the early peaks, which show the auditory nerve in the inner ear, he saw way less firing than normal. The patients were getting less sound input because they had hidden hearing loss. But then he looked at the later peaks on the squiggle, the ones that showed what happened as the sound signal winds its way into the brain.
So now you're looking at the brainstem response. And interestingly, the participant with tinnitus had response as big as those who never had tinnitus.
For tinnitus patients, the peak at the brainstem was larger than at the nerve. Something was making up for the hidden hearing loss and turning the volume up. Somehow, the brain is able to catch up Stefan was basically seeing the seeds of tinnitus on this squiggle graph. This thing that didn't show up in normal hearing tests. This thing that so many patients had been told wasn't real.
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