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
this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2025
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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
how could it be anything but physical?
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.
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.
Why would a damaged hair cell make noise?
Because they're broken
They're screaming
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Somebody much smarter than me will be able provide answers!
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.
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. 🙂
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Here is an interview with her. She had it bad:
“I do have a chronic health condition, which made it difficult to pinpoint if it was that that was suddenly getting worse, or whether it was [the damage to the ear] that was causing neurological changes, but I literally couldn’t walk straight; I was having what looked like strokes where I would collapse.” A violinist, she was told by doctors to give up playing. When the COVID pandemic arrived a few months in, she was forced to shield because of ultimately false suspicions that she had MS. “I got really frustrated,” De La Mata says. “I wasn’t getting any of the answers I wanted. It was, ‘Your hearing is fine, you’re young, you’re healthy,’ and it’s like, well clearly I’m not if I can’t walk and people are feeding me.”
https://thequietus.com/interviews/lola-de-la-mata-oceans-on-azimuth-tinnitus-interview/
A violinist, she was told by doctors to give up playing.
i've had doctors recommend similar. i've basically learned MDs gave up all their dreams and they expect us to do so as well
Mine doesn't sound quite like that, but it did get a little better for a while after listening to that.
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So its a real sound? Noise cancelling implants then?
My tinnitus is at the very upper frequency range of my ability to hear, right around 13,000 Hz (I'm 60). Fortunately, I don't notice it except in a quiet room.
extremely dumb question, but would a very loud 13kHz sound kill the cochlear cells that detect that specific frequency?
now we're onto something. shoot that tinnitus dead with high frequency sound lasers
Nuke the tinnitus lol
A few rock concerts should take care of that, then.
Makes it worse from my experience. Tends to deaden everything but the squeal
This is the one thing I don’t like about some doctors and scientists: they think they know everything, and in doing so they become lazy and dismissive (or they only care about money and fame). They should always be curious, and always seek to find the next truth, no matter what the general consensus is in the community. Good on De La Mata for challenging the status quo.
that's a good philosophy in general. but I'm practice, it's hard.
for every million "that can't be" theories only a handful pan out. doing every "stupid" experiment is practically impossible.
This is literally an example of a scientist being curious about something they don't know and setting up an extremely far fetched experiment.
I got rid of my handheld game after I noticed my thumb was starting to twitch while I was at rest.
Apparently, the same thing can happen with ears.
i had decent pitch before my tinnitus, but it rings at a constant e8. now i have perfect pitch.
This was already known. Some forms of tinnitus are 'real'
Fucking voodoo shit, get the fuck out of here with that.
Buddhist monks call this the sound of silence
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