TINNITUS: A PING TO RING IN THE EAR
After a tough and long day, as you lie down tired to rest and close your eye. While expecting silence, you may hear a faint clinging noise, though there is nothing to produce it!
This is known as “Tinnitus”. The perception of a sound that is buzzing, hissing, clinging or ringing without any external cause producing it. It is a common condition affecting one in every seven worldwide, that has been disturbing since 2000 BC. Leonardo Da Vinci, Charles Darwin, Michelangelo were also the victims of this plague.
Why does this Constant Sound come?
When we normally hear something, the sound waves travels into our ear canals, passing through various parts of the ear and finally reaching a spiral shaped structure called the “Cochlea”. Cochlea contains fluids, which when stimulated on large sound wave vibrations, elicit chemical reactions which transforms the sound waves into electrical neuronal signals. These signals conducted by the nerves are called as the “Nerve Impulses”. The nerve impulses are sent to the Brain through the Hearing pathway of the nervous system and are perceived as sound by the brain. In vast majority of the tinnitus cases, these nerve impulses doesn’t have anything to do with the ear at all. These impulses are created by brain itself.
At usual circumstances, these self produced nerve impulses are essential for hearing. In fact, all mammals display on-going neural activity through their hearing pathway. When there is no sound present, these activities are at very minimal levels, which is considered as silence by the brain; when a sound arises these neural activities intensifies, in order to alert the brain. The auditory health may affect this process — loud noises, diseases, toxins or natural aging can affect the Cochlear cells. Most of these would heal by itself in a matter of time. But when a large number of cells die, gradually over a period of time or suddenly, the auditory system will become less sensitive to alert the brain over external sounds.
With lesser Cochlear cells, the external sound waves produce weaker impulses, resulting in reduced capability to recognize them as “sound” by the brain. In order to compensate this, brain devotes more energy in this hearing process. Similar as that of adjusting the radio frequencies, brain modifies the neural activity just like tweaking the tuning knob of the radios for better signals. This increasing of background neural activity for processing weak auditory inputs, raises the baseline neural activities above the silence level. Thus lack of external sound is not silent at all. This is known as “Subjective Tinnitus”.
Silence is no longer silence.
Subjective Tinnitus is the vast majority of tinnitus cases and is the symptom in most ear disorders. Subjective Tinnitus is not a bad thing and has no inherent negative consequences. But for few persons, tinnitus can trigger some traumatic memories or distressing emotions that increases the sound’s intrusiveness. This psychological spiral, often causes “Bothersome Tinnitus”. The Bothersome tinnitus can further cause Post traumatic stress disorders, insomnias and depressions.
What can be done for this?
Unfortunately there is no cure for Subjective tinnitus, so what best the doctors can do is, educating the individuals about this auditory event and help developing a neutral association with these frequently-disquieting sounds.
For example, “Sound Therapy” use sounds of rain, bird chirping songs or calming music to mask tinnitus and reduce stress. “Informational Masking” uses soothing and complex sound signals that distracts the brain from the tinnitus; “Energetic Masking” uses the same frequency of the person’s tinnitus to distract the neurons which otherwise signals the tinnitus frequency to the brain.
“Counseling”, simultaneously along with these intervention can help the individual recuperate their relation with Tinnitus.
Though tinnitus means absence of silence. On the brighter side, it means the brain is constantly analyzing the world around it, despite it fails to recognize its own internal sounds. In a sense, going through tinnitus is like listening to the brain talking to itself — though it is a conversation one wishes to avoid hearing!
