Ringing in the ears [edited title]

Factual Questions
1

what exactly IS that high pitched ringing in your ear?

2

This reminds me of when a friend said to me

“can’t you hear that car alarm?”.

“I can now, bastard”

3

Could be tinitus.

4

Probably not what DuhCow meant but cool anyway - > If you concentrate on ‘hearing’ the space you are in, you can sort of ‘hear’ the silence.

Almost buddhist or something.

5

IIRC, when one suffers hearing damage (by loud music or other such noise, presumably), oftentimes the upper frequency is the first to go. In the inner ear, each sound recepting cell has a hair attuned to a certain frequency that translates the incoming noise (after it’s been passed throught the timpanic membrane of course) to the auditory nerve to be interpreted by the brain. If these hairs get damaged (again likely to be higher frequency), one will hear a temporary ringing indicating the cell has lost functionality and is reporting a false positive to the auditory nerve that whatever frequency it is associated with is being heard. Once the brain realizes that you’ve been hearing the same frequency for such a long time, it tends to shut off the cell, ignoring the incoming signal. High pitched ringing as a result of loud noises often results in permanent hearing loss. If you are talking about everyday, now and again high pitched ringing, you are refering of course to tinitus. I’m not sure of the specifics here, but something triggers the specific hair cell to sende false positive signals to the brain. In this case, the cell is not permantly damaged and can recover to hear its frequency again. This is information I vaguely remember from my bio class last year, so you should probably google it up to find definitive answer. Feel free to correct me, anyone.

6

Cecil Adams on What causes ringing in your ears?

7

I have edited the thread title from ears to Ringing in the ears. In the future please try to choose more descriptive titles.

bibliophage
moderator GQ

8

You might want to also investigate Meniere’s Disease. Tinnitus can sometimes be one of the first symptoms, and it gets progressively more annoying from there.