this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2025
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I've always learned it comes from damaged hair cells inside the ear, how could it be anything but physical? Very surprised it can be picked up with a microphone in an anechoic chamber though
It's called objective tinnitus. Tinnitus can have different causes, the damaged hair cells one is the most common.
I was with you until: "[...] but it can also be heard by the examiner (eg, by placing a stethoscope over the patient's external auditory canal)." and now I'm even more confused
The DC power supply inside your ears is only medium quality and so your preamp is prone to picking up coil whine.
The sound? Well, ultimately sounds are just those hairs and your cochlea and eardrum and all that getting hit by vibrations in the air and sending signals to your brain which get interpreted; damage the equipment so it sends signals even when there's no vibrations in the air hitting it, and you have your non-physical sound. Same way phantom limb syndrome works.
However what if the damage doesn't cause signals in the absence of sound? What if tinnitus is actually the cochlea itself (or something/s in the apparatus anyway) physically vibrating and producing that whining sound? Like a mosquito's wings beating.
Makes sense, and I've also read it's very hard to study as well. Different causes with the same perceived sound sounds like a diagnostic nightmare
It seems like it could be some kind of feedback loop where the false signalling is actually inducing a physical response that can be recorded under ideal conditions. At the end of the day, the eardrum is an audio transducer, and every other such device we know of can make "fake noise" by being pushed into an unstable state.
What is the mechanism for the ‘physical response’? Your proposition assumes that the eardrum or the cochlea have some kinda muscle that would vibrate them, which makes no sense and hasn't ever been a part of the ear anatomy.
Any organic motion detector is just a series of mechanical, chemical and electrical connections which translate the motion to nerve impulses. All these things can work backwards, although likely with much less efficiency. It's a reasonable theory that there's a path creating these sounds from tinnitus even if the original source is the brain nerve signals. Of course there's of other conflicting theories too. But it's hard to experiment to figure it out as we can't cut apart a functioning system to see what parts are doing what - well we probably could, but the ethics board might have a problem with that.
Nobody said it would have to be the cochlea or the eardrum specifically. Involuntary muscle contractions of the tensor tympani and stapedius muscles which are both connected to the ossicular chain of "hearing bones" inside your ear, for example, can generate audible sounds through involuntary contractions that change the tension of the eardrum. When processed by the auditory system, these contractions can be experienced as tinnitus. This is known as muscular tinnitus (https://dizziness-and-balance.com/disorders/hearing/tinnitus/ME.html). So what I'm saying is, maybe there are other physical mechanisms of action that we didn't even think to look for until the physical sound was recorded from a case that was expected to be entirely neurological.
I'm not a medical professional, I just did some reading.
Yeah, I always thought it was just the brain filling in the blanks by lack of data as in no data meaning "constant sound" or something.
If you can actually hear the tinnitus it's very promising for curing it, if it's a spasm in a micromuscle of the ear trying to free the hair from mucus there could potentially be a way to have something slow release a muscle relaxant in the ear to remove it as an example.
Right, I thought the same! Like a weight scale that got pushed on too hard and can't be tared back to 0, so it always reads some weight even with nothing on it. My neck is still stiff from the double-take i did when I saw this 😂
That's still a physical sound even if the source is internal or at the sensor.
"Non-physical sound" would necessarily be errant nerve signaling or hallucination, something on the brain side of the sensor.
Yes. I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with? The discovery was that it is possible to record tinnitus from someone's ear when we thought it was a neurological phenomenon. So tinnitus does actually produce a physical sound, even in cases that don't have a known physical cause like muscular tinnitus (https://dizziness-and-balance.com/disorders/hearing/tinnitus/ME.html). I'm just theorising what could be causing the physical sound in such cases.
edit: oh, I see, this is in context of the question I was replying to. "Physical sound" doesn't mean "it was perceived by something physical" it means it's actual vibrations in the air. We thought tinnitus was just abnormal brain activity, not a physical sound; turns out that is at least partially wrong.
Yeah you caught it in the edit 😁
I have a kind of tinnitus that comes and goes based on how stressed out the tendons in my neck and jaw are, on one side, after a pretty serious physical injury.
I can basically massage away my tinnitus a good deal of the time, its only on the side that got fucked up.
Beyond that, I actually have exceptionally good hearing (for my age at least), and I often hear things other people don't even notice, yay autism!
Poorly shielded electronic devices go ~~BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT~~ EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
Poorly shielded inductors in switch mode PSUs/old CRTs for me (Very common in older devices, low current causes the switching frequency to drop into the audible range.)
You can build your own tinnitus inducer with a cheapo 100kHz buck ic, put an air coil inductor on it, and then decrease the current until failure.
Let's also not forget the dreaded '... what do you mean I need to replace the batteries in my smoke detector?'
Though, I don't think you have to be autistic for that to be extremely annoying, lol.
About 2/3 of my family (including me) have the same thing, some kind of hereditary issue with the nerve that runs from the jaw up behind the ear. Accompanied by most of us also having jaws that don't quite fit in their sockets properly and tend to pop and crunch from time to time.
Why would a damaged hair cell make noise?
If you close your eyes tightly you can induce the perception of color. If you stand in a doorway and lift your arms to the side so that the backs of your hands are pressing against the inside of the door frame, keep pressing for 60 seconds, then step out of the doorway and relax your arms: it'll feel like your arms are floating.
The body's systems are complex and part of reliably filtering signal from noise in such systems is establishing a baseline while in a steady state. Our brains are pretty good at filtering out noise but the pressures or degradations which lead to tinnitus seem to trick the brain into accepting some noise as signal.
If you're looking for a deep dive then the following paper does an excellent job of outling what we know and what our best guesses are so far: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306987724002718
It's jargon-laden but nothing someone armed with a dictionary can't handle. 🙂
Right, but I'm not talking about perceiving noise, I'm talking about creating noise.
Ah. My bad. That's kind of covered indirectly within the third reference paper (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959438808000871) and more-so in this paper: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2724262
Part of the process for our hearing involves otoacoustic emission (wikipedia), i.e., creating sound. My arm-chair understanding is that we think this part of the process misbehaving is a main contributor for objective tinnitus and why we can record it under the right circumstances.
tl;dr: ear too loud.
I'm in the same spot. Obviously I believe it happens if I'm reading it from a credible source, but the idea that a hair makes sound that other people can record and hear doesn't make sense. How does it do that??
Because they're broken
They're screaming
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Maybe it's like the way microphones and speakers are basically the same hardware, with the cells surrounding the hair in your ear canal vibrating those hairs "out" at high frequency for some reason.
Somebody much smarter than me will be able provide answers!
The hair cell's whole job is to send neuronal signal when there's vibration at its specific frequency. It's entirely conceivable that a cell would get stuck in the ‘send signal’ mode when damaged, just as it can go the other way and send no signal ever anymore.
Right, which would make the owner of the hair percieve a sound that isn't happening. The novel part is other people being able to hear it too.