this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2025
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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