When your ears get blocked from loud noises, and you can’t hear for a while, what exactly happened inside your ear. It seems to reset itself somehow.
I don’t know if it’s applicable in this case but most of our senses are subject to fatigue. A constant stimulus is “tuned out” and the sense no longer responds. A common example is the sense of smell. You can only smell your own cologne for a while and then you stop noticing it but everyone you meet can smell it fine.
“To do her justice, I can’t see that she could have found anything nastier to say if she’d thought it out with both hands for a fortnight.”
Dorothy L. Sayers
Busman’s Honeymoon
I think the muscles around the eardrum do tighten stretching the eardrum tighter. Therefore making the eardrum less sensitive to the loud noise. The muscles eventually relax and normal hearing returns.
Sounds good to me, anyway.
Well, there are a couple of things that could be going on. The first is the loud noises have actually damaged some of the sound receptors in your ear. When your ear rings that’s what happens - a receptor for a particular frequency has been knocked into overdrive. Noises can also be blocked out by neurons between the ear in the brain. They become tired of firing and stop. (Actually there’s some chemical deficiency that happens when the keep firing but I don’t know enough details so I’ll leave it at that.) The other possibility is that it’s in your brain, you just start ignoring the noise.
One thing that happens when deaf people get their hearing back is that they can’t ‘focus’ sound. All the sounds come in at once & if you couldn’t hear much before, that is A LOT of racket.
So I suppose the brain could focus on silence until its ready for some sound?