Got it randomly one day this summer.

It's impossible to describe how depressing it is to hear a sound non stop in your ears, night and day, wherever I go or whatever I do, it just never stops.

The brain started filtering it out a bit after months, but it's always there and you're often reminded of it when you're in a slightly more silent environment.

There are days where it becomes especially loud and falling asleep you'd just like to cry or something.

Don't wish it on anybody.

> The Oxford researchers proposed that the large spontaneous waves of brain activity that occur during deep sleep, or non-rapid eye movement sleep (non-REM), might suppress the brain activity that leads to tinnitus.

I've been following the work of Auricle Inc., a company commercializing decades of neuroscience research out of Dr. Susan Shore's lab at the University of Michigan. (Full disclosure: I have spoken to their CEO about potentially helping with their funding, although my primary concern is getting their product to the public).

Instead of just masking the sound, their device targets the root cause using bimodal neuromodulation. It pairs specific audio tones with mild electrical pulses to the jaw/neck to desynchronize hyperactive neurons in the dorsal cochlear nucleus.

Here are the two papers that cover the underlying science, and go over the efficacy:

The foundational mechanism and Phase 1 trial showing how it induces long-term depression (LTD) in the brain circuitry: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.aal3175

The Phase 2 double-blind, randomized clinical trial results showing significant reductions in tinnitus loudness and burden: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

1. Place your hands over your ears such that your fingers are on the back of your skull - thumbs should be on your neck and middle fingers at the base of your skull.

2. Tap your middle fingers on the base of your skull repeatedly for ~30 seconds

It apparently doesn’t work for everyone, and it’s not permanent, but for me it greatly reduces the “volume” or stops it entirely.

I have no idea what the explanation is, but it’s free, safe, and you can try it right now.

Hope that helps! Tinnitus sucks.

Hold up. How do we know when ferrets have tinnitus???

And this I can sometimes use to pinpoint my tinnitus tone(s): https://generalfuzz.net/acrn/

The surgeon dentist was really surprised by this and could not evoke any similar cases in their practice before mine.

I randomly get something in my head that sounds pretty close to coil whine, but definitely isn't coil whine — I've had it when I'm in the depths of the wilderness with no electronics.

It typically lasts less than 20s and I can go months between occurrences.

I suppose I wouldn’t have noticed this if I was trying to tune out tinnitus, but I’m just used to it? Not like anything is every quiet (my hearing is hyperactive), but, like, the tone and volume of it right now is “insufficient sleep but circadian forced us awake” so I need to be particularly measured and chill if I drive while it’s this loud.

I always thought that tinnitus is caused by a "rusted" acoustic nerve wire (here it's coexistence with hearing loss) no central mechanism is evolved. Linking non-REM sleep phase to tinnitus production is unexpected.

My brain eventually figured out how to tune it out and now it associates the sound with silence.

Now I've developed it again after feeling depressed and blasting music in my car. The new version crackles and alternates tones in my left ear. I have a doctors appointment coming up to hopefully figure it out.

There is a new expensive treatment for it called Lenore which works by playing sounds and stimulating your tongue at the same time. Those pathways are located close together in the brain and by stimulating both at the same time, it's supposed to train it to filter out the noise.

The article briefly links to another article that Tinnitus triggers your fight-or-flight response and I agree. You need to get rid of this instinctive response by moving it more into your awareness.

My life is so much better now.

The first time I got sick and it started, I went walking around the neighborhood looking for the source of the noise until I realized I had tinnitus. Sounded like some kind of distant earth works / resonance thing.

Really feel for people who have it permanently.

My tinnitus is much worse now, but I don't have a TV in my room anymore, so I just play a podcast on my iPad. That tiny built-in speaker doesn't really cover up the tinnitus, but the voices lull me to sleep (which is probably what the TV was doing all along).

I wonder how you tell if a ferret is experiencing tinnitus? I did ^F on the paper for ferret but didn't find anything.

If my ears start ringing like I feel tinnitus has arrived, I've found it goes away by cycling this pressure a couple times.

YMMV

Always had trouble falling asleep though, ever since I was a young sperm.

Like others pointed a bad night sleep definitely increases the perceived sound.

Also the stress in the shoulders doesn't help.

But after that article I heard nothing more. I just looked it up and seems it may not be a reliable method.

Unfortunately I don’t live near a coast so this is something I can regularly tryout.

Can confirm

But especially the coming and going and how it seems affected to level of tiredness or amount of sleep I got.. Of course, reading the article made me aware of it and now it's loud than before..

I've had strong symptoms of adhd my whole life, but never thought much of it (except as a lack of self dicipline and general failure of a broken robot to impersonate a real human), but as demands on my performance rose to real-adult levels with a young child and duties beyond not dying, I decided to tell the doc how it had generally felt like to be myself, at which point I was referred to someone with a specialty in broken brains, and we quickly agreed that while I wasn't going to become normal, certain stimulants at least provided me with sufficient energy to carry out most of the functions expected by an adult member of society with actual responsibilities.

And so, over the past.. more than a year, I've gotten to experience a little bit of everything as my brain gets to oscillate between being slightly oversaturated to absolutely drained of certain neurotransmitters in a way that at the same time feels slightly unsustainable and the only alternative where I get to not be absolutely miserable all the time.

The point of that story, being, these "phantom precepts", fits the bill somewhat well. I've always had a very conscious experience of common neurological phenomenon which are naturally present but largely-unnoticed by many (auras, visual snow, floaters, phosphenes, tinnitus, afterimages) so I'm probably a bit one the sensitive side, and, the medication seems to have a quite interesting effect on these as well, among them, I noticed the ABSENCE of noticing my clothes touching my skin.. I am no longer acutely aware of the cooling sensation of inhaling air through my nose, and I rarely hear the beat of my heart in my ears.. Maybe the weirdest effect is on saccades, in a conversation, looking from one person to the next seems to be as instant as before, but the blur of my eyes moving between points of focus is gone, it's kind of jarring, just poof, one picture, then another.. nothing in between.

I now seem to be able to influence my attention somewhat, that is, to do whatever that cognitive regulation is called, so that my focus shifts to a subject I need to do but have no interest in doing (oh wait, that's why I got the medication), but it does make me wonder, if tinnitus is just one of the more obvious (and therefore common) neurological processes that "pokes through" maybe perception of sound and attention (and maybe therefore also conscious experience of sound) have evolved to be more strongly linked (because if you notice the predator sneaking up on you, you get to not be eaten).

Maybe this stronger link is why tinnitus is so obvious, and maybe sleep is instrumental in regulating consciousness, so if consciousness is differently regulated, or less regulated, maybe it's easier for the phenomenon to "seep through".