Maybe this doesn’t happen to everybody. Maybe its all the acid. Maybe its not enough acid. I don’t know. Hence, the question…
If it gets totally silent, like in the early evening or in some sealed environment, when there is no sound…there is that buzzzz, like the amplifiers on stage at a rock concert when they’re not yet being used.
What is that? Does my brain make a noise only it can hear? Is is an auditory hallucination? And, most important of all, can I make it go away? And why is it set to C-sharp?
(Somebody once told me it was the sound of household electricity, but I’ve been far enough away from electricity to test that, and, nope, that ain’t it.)
The ads on this page probably have the correct diagnosis, although I don’t imagine that homeopathy will do much. Try http://www.medicinenet.com/tinnitus/article.htm for more reasonable advice. I have it too, only mine is a very high-pitched squeal, much higher than I can hear in the real world (I’m about 80% deaf, 100% for frequencies above baritone.) How do you know it’s C#?
I have tinnitus. Mine sounds like cicada. MDs in the '70 said there was nothing they could do. I’ve not checked in 30 years. Now I’ve no money to check.
I have the same problem (tinnitus). Like someone left speakers on with no sound coming out. It comes and goes but is never completely gone. I’ve been told by medical folks that there’s nothing to be done about it. I’m also very sensitive to electronic noises, like when a TV is on with no sound, but this is a permanent, inside-my-head problem.
Oh gosh, I always thought this was just normal! I know my grandmother could hear it too, we called it the sound of silence. I’ve never actually tried to figure out what tone it is though. I’m sure the next time I get some silence I’d be able to find out if it’s C# or not.
This whole tinnitus thing, I don’t know, sounds like latin for a shrug. I mean, if I were a rock star or something, sure, ear injury. But it sounds a little like the disease thats impossible to cure because it doesn’t have a cause.
I think it’s because the cause would be hard to cure, because it deals with damage to intricate hair-like parts of our hearing apparatus, and that’s impossible at this time to amend.
Ain’t a new thing, either. My grandfather was a 30’s-50’s session/band
musician in LA, and I remember my grandmother saying that all those guys lost their hearing with tinnitus as they aged. She was wondering about me and my Walkman earphones in the 80’s. She was prolly right on time with that, as usual.
Check out the article Mapache linked to, and the Wikipedia article on tinnitus. It’s not just ear injuries from noise, or ear infections. Lots of different things cause and/or aggravate tinnitus. There’s a big ol’ list on the Wikipedia page.
While I was exposed to a lot of loud music as a youth as well as more ear infections than normal, I have TMJD (a crappy jaw, basically) and my tinnitus has gotten much worse as a symptom of that.
I’ve got it too, only mine sounds like a damn smoke alarm; it is so loud, I can hear it over the traffic on the freeway.
I went to one of the foremost tinnitus specialists at Mass. Eye & Ear, and he said there is no cure. He explained the sound isn’t even coming from your ear. When the inner ear is damaged, it ceases to send even the data that tells the brain that it is silent. The brain fills in the missing data, which creates the perception of sound. The phantom sound would remain even if the auditory nerve was severed.
I wonder how much of it is electronic noises. When we went days without power, I didn’t hear the normal noise (which to me sounds like the noise that tube tvs and CRT monitors make, and only some of us hear) nearly as much as when everything is working correctly. There was still some, though, which kind of surprised me.
edit: I just noticed on the wiki page that Tetracycline is a drug that causes it. Ironic since so many of us were given it to cure ear infections. Discolored teeth, tinnitus, it’s the gift that kept on giving.
