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He mentioned it rather briefly in one of our exchanges via email so I took the time to do my own research on the subject and found that it is not a myth, you can lose haircells without heavy synapse loss but this also works the other way round too, you can lose synapses without losing its corresponding haircell OR the the two can occur alongside one another.
To me at least this lifts a huge question mark over noise induced T and or H and hearing loss and is also why I heavily agree with Libermans findings and I'll explain why.
We see many people suffering from hearing loss with no T and we always ask why is that the case? Your degree of hearing loss does not equate how severe your T or H is so why is that? If T and H are a result of hearing loss then literally every person on this planet would have T but they don't and of course this just adds more confusion to an already confusing condition, but I think Liberman has found the answer. To me it points at another factor one not typically accounted for by most audiologists and that's a secondary hearing loss not currently detectable i.e hidden hearing loss. People with hearing loss and no T simply haven't lost their synapses, they remain intact and how does Liberman and Co know this? Simple, Cochlear implants.
A Cochlear implant simply would not work if these synapses or fibres were missing or damaged but they do work and that's a huge clue, if haircell loss meant synapse loss then a profoundly deaf person wouldn't be able to hear with a CI but they do! This shows that even after haircell death these fibres can remain intact regardless of the loss and I've read quite a few papers that have observed this during studies.
Then we move onto someone with perfect hearing but yet have T and H after a rock concert, all hearing tests show up normal and everybody scratches their head and blames the brain but rather simply these people have suffered a synaptic trauma(my term)and not a haircell trauma.
Their haircells recovered from the noise exposure but it's underlying synapses did not and this is where T generates from.This is not a myth either(see picture)haircells can survive a trauma but lose synaptic connections to the brain.
It's also entirely possible to lose both from an acoustic trauma so in summary,
-Normal hearing loss without T is haircell loss with no damage to underlying neurons
-T and H are a result of damage to these underlying neurons or synaptopathy
-The two can happen independently or occur alongside one another
To me this unraveled the mystery behind T and H, Liberman could be wrong of course but I heavily doubt it, it's too logical to ignore in my opinion.