Auditory Mirror Therapy for Treatment of Tinnitus

I think I am starting to accept that it is possible. The hope I have is that the hype the devices generate, and perhaps even initial commercial success spur capitalists to try to pursue additional treatments/cures. Given that Dr. Shore's device is based on actual research, even if copycats pop up trying to make a buck, there is the possibility a grifter actually gets it right, plagiarizing Dr. Shore's and others' recent work. It's kind of the best hope there is right now, to be honest.

 

I don't think it is going to be grifter copy-cats that do anything to improve our situation, but if Dr. Shore's device can actually alleviate our issue on some meaningful level, I think there will be a lot of other smart people who will try to improve upon her ideas.

If her device works, I'd like to think of it being like the steam engine. The steam engine is absolutely brilliant and changed the course of human history, but it looks primitive next to the nuclear reactors that power submarines and aircraft carriers of today.

 

If it worked, they would have said so by now. If it does not, they will delay publishing the results as long as possible to continue to get funding.

 

Even if it only works for 30% to 40% of people to reduce their tinnitus by 6 dB to 12 dB, I wouldn't call that a flop, even though it's not the miracle treatment we dream about. But if it turns out to be more like the Lenire reviews, that's a flop.

 

Maybe it has worked, and they’re delaying the publication of results until they can figure out how to protect their IP.

There have been some recent articles on this therapy with a bit more information:

• Researchers Develop Headphones That May Treat Tinnitus by Rewiring the Brain
• The headphones that could ease tinnitus with a radical new treatment

Note the mention of the possibility of a third trial...!

 

Haha! Real professionals at work (they've probably never heard of the placebo effect). They state at the end:

I could have saved myself four minutes of my life if they had started with this sentence...

 

For those interested, the patent application is quite informative. See the attached file. In addition to the simple method used in the trial, where the left and right microphones were reversed, he talks about further refinements to only reverse frequencies in the range of the person's tinnitus and introducing audio delays into the system, all with the goal of further 'confusing' the auditory system.

I plan on modifying a pair of headphones myself to try this and will report back, although I do see that a forum member that participated in the trial noted no effect whatsoever

 

My contact for the trial vanished after I was promised results would be sent to me in October 2023.

I would also try modifying the 3M headset if I knew how. Lol. I believe I had the placebo.

 

Here goes nothing - my weekend project!

Very weird walking around with these on - my own footsteps coming from the wrong direction and need to be very careful with traffic

 

It would be cool if something so simple could help alleviate our symptoms. I hope each of these treatments gets us a few decibels lower each time. None of these treatments have to be perfect; they all need to make a dent until our ears eventually return to something normal.

In the links you posted, this line stood out to me: "To better test how well AMT works, a larger study with a placebo control is currently underway with 50 participants who have moderate to severe tinnitus." I'm glad to see that they are actually doing a real study, and I imagine this could scale pretty quickly.

 

I'm interested to know how you did this?

 

I bought the same headphones as used in the study - Peltor Tactical 300 and disassembled them to get access to the microphones and circuit board:

• Desolder the wires from left and right microphones from the left and right PCB
• Attach extension wires to the microphones
• Solder the wires from the left micophone to the right side PCB
• Solder the wires from the right micophone to the left side PCB
• Reassemble

The most time consuming part was disassembling/reassembling without damaging anything

 

I wonder what the frequency range is and if it matters. I am afraid this kind of headphones convey a very limited range of audio frequencies, e.g., up to 8 kHz, so you might not stimulate the specific region in the brain associated with the perception of higher frequencies.

 

I find this idea intriguing, especially after reading about research on missing limbs and phantom pain. However, I don't think this concept is related to that research. The main idea behind phantom pain research involves showing participants their missing limb (via mirrors) along with their healthy present limb. This visual stimuli is so strong in the brain that phantom pain dissolves over time (often requiring multiple sessions).

In this case, simply rerouting sounds from the right to the left ear and vice versa might not help. To mimic the phantom pain experiment, we would need to convince the brain that it hears all frequencies it's supposed to hear, even if it's not in reality. And how do you do that? We obviously can't use a mirror for this.

Even with a headset, you still wouldn't hear the frequencies you're supposed to hear, even if they are rerouted from the opposite side.

 

I think this is a pile of absolute junk. We already have cross hearing aids that do that.

 

I won't be surprised if you're right—I'm only trying it because it's low-risk, and I have some time on my hands right now. I'll update you in a couple of weeks.

However, I don't think cross hearing aids are the same thing. I thought they re-route sound from the side of the bad ear to the good one so that you get L+R sound all channeled into the better ear, whereas this experiment is doing a complete swap.

 

I had similar concerns over that question, too. But thinking about it, although this treatment would lack the powerful visual effect a mirror provides amputees, it does have a visual trickery aspect to it, in as much as the brain would expect the eyes to see the origin of a sound heard coming from the left to be located in the lefthand field of view instead of (in the case of an active treatment) the righthand field of view — a kind of mirroring.

 

Admittedly, it's a sample size of one, but unfortunately, this didn't do anything for me. Maybe the weird sensation of sounds coming from the wrong direction could provide a distraction for people with mild/moderate tinnitus, but I'm not in that category.

Anyway, not to take from the professor's work on this, I'll reiterate a sample size of one, and I wasn't following any strict protocol other than trying to get in two hours a day over a two-week period. I also suspect the environment matters because if you're simply sitting at a desk, as I was for a fair chunk of the time, there is no ambient sound to reverse, so it's no great surprise that there'd be no effect. It may be a different story when you're busy out and about, doing stuff in a sound-enriched environment.

I have a modified set of headphones available if anyone else wants to try it.

 

So, did you try it, and did you get any benefits?