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.
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.
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.
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??
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.
Why would a damaged hair cell make noise?
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.
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??
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.
Because they’re broken
They’re screaming
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Somebody much smarter than me will be able provide answers!