Researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center hypothesize that tinnitus may be produced by an unfortunate combination of structural and functional changes in the brain. According to the study, tinnitus - the phantom ringing heard by about 40 million people in the US today - is caused by brains that try, but fail, to protect their human hosts against overwhelming auditory stimuli. Researchers add that the same process may be responsible for chronic pain and other perceptual disorders.
The researcherrs say that the absence of sound from hearing loss in certain frequencies due to normal aging, loud-noise exposure or an accident, forces the brain to produce sounds to replace what's missing. Tinnitus results when the brain's limbic system (which is involved in processing emotions and other functions) fails to stop these sounds from reaching conscious auditory pathways.
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I liken Tinnitus to a "phantom limb." When someone loses an arm or a leg, it's common for them to have the sensation that they can still feel that limb - they can feel it moving or feel temperature changes. Tinnitus is similar. You have lost a part of your hearing, but your brain still has the sensation that sound is still there. So you are, in essence, getting a false-firing of that hearing nerve - something is triggering a sound when there is not a sound there.
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