How Is Tinnitus Possible without Hair Cell Damage?

[85dB T]

Question please?

When we experience a loud noise our ears ring instantly. Sometimes this subsides and the ringing fades away.

Other times the ringing is permanent leaving us with tinnitus.

In the first instance 'tinnitus' is experienced and goes away. So the hair cells were not damaged yet the person experienced tinnitus. So why do we assume the hair cells are damaged in the case of permanent tinnitus? (I'm sure in many cases they're damaged, but in all cases?)

Seems like so many other things could be the cause of tinnitus other than damaged hair cells. The fact you can have tinnitus after a loud noise and it goes away suggests hair cell damage is not the prevalent cause as many claim. IMHO.

 

[Contrast]

Roland Schaette showed that ear plugs starves the auditory nerve of input and generate temporary tinnitus.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3366980/

You need to view tinnitus as "the brain failing the communicate to certain auditory nerve fibers of the inner ear" so it generates a phantom signal for lack of a peripheral input.

 

[daiso]

I don't believe in the brain "intentionally" generating tinnitus when starved of noise nor in the theory of recruitment. I'm a scientific person by trade and has some, though limited, knowledge on artificial intelligence and neural networks. When in silence, the hair cells has a specific pattern of spatial arrangement. The brain is a massive neural network and my hypothesis is that we trained our brain since birth (probably more accurate at conception as it develops) by lack of responses to that pattern so that the brain does not produce perception of sound. When that pattern is permanently altered, whether by acoustic trauma or ototoxic drugs, virus or whatever, it is no longer recognizable as the normal "silence" pattern, but one of the gazillion patterns possible when when the hair cells are "moved" by sound waves, and thus be interpreted as sounds by the brain. Even with no hair cells damage, any temporary or permanent changes to the auditory pathway prior to the hair cells can also cause the hair cells to deviate from that pattern of silence. Unfortunately once that happen, there is just no way to get back to that old pattern.

That's why I think most of the advice, whether from people who actually recovered or habituated, to not to have any emotional response to tinnitus is not far from the truth or maybe even the truth. In artificial intelligence, training needs lots of inputs and outputs. So by not responding to tinnitus, we are training our brain to recognize the altered hair cell pattern as the new pattern of silence. But unlike artificial intelligence where training only needs lots of canned inputs and outputs and computer time, our brain needs human time to encounter all the possible scenarios to be considered silence and that's where the time factor comes in.

Long theory, but at least I take some comfort in that. And BTW, I also try to think that unexplained spikes are due to the brain zig-zagging its ways (or converging) towards that new pattern of silence.