Helpful tips for ringing in the ears

Tinnitus arises when this flexibility goes bad. Things may start to go awry when toxic drugs, loud noises, or even whiplash cause damage to the nerve hairs in the ears. The injured nerve hairs can no longer send signals from the ear to the tone map. Bereft of incoming signals, the neurons undergo a peculiar transformation: They start to eavesdrop on their neighbors, firing in response to other frequencies. They even start to fire sometimes without any incoming signals. As the brain’s feedback controls get rewired, the neurons end up in a self-sustaining loop, producing a constant ringing. That is why tinnitus often doesn’t go away when people get their auditory nerve surgically cut.

It’s not just the auditory cortex that is affected when people get tinnitus. Neuroscientists, using increasingly sophisticated brain scans, are finding that changes ripple out across the entire brain. Winfried Schlee of the University of Konstanz in Germany and his colleagues have been making some of the most detailed studies of tinnitus ever, using a method called magnetoencephalography (MEG, for short). They take advantage of the fact that every time neurons send each other signals, their electric current creates a tiny magnetic field. MEG allows scientists to detect such changing patterns of activity in the brain 100 times per second.

a disease of networks that span the brain.


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wow this information actually makes me feel worse.