I would swap with anyone who has very mild tinnitus that can be heard only in total silence.
This is of course based only on how those individuals describe their tinnitus.
Yea, that's the interesting thing Val. I've had various forms of tinnitus over the years so I know for a fact (from my perspective) that tinnitus is harder to deal with when it's loud. However, we are dealing with something akin to phantom pain here. The noise we hear doesn't come through the same signal chain of a real outside noise. When we hear a real sound there is a complex system/chain of events that occur. The brain has to decide what's important and what isn't so it can amplify the information we need most. This is why we tend to filter out useless background noises whilst working in an office, for example, or whilst talking in a bar, etc. Even then, we would be simplifying the process by quite a margin. The brain will also attribute emotional significance to the incoming broadband sound, such as, if we heard an unexpected lions roar, or distant gun shot, it would instinctively flood our system with cortisol and adrenaline. Our perceptions would heighten, and we'd have a physiological reaction. There's a lot of complexity, in fact, even the word complexity doesn't cut it here.
With tinnitus, it's already a part of our brain. We are essentially hearing our own nervous system at work. So little is understood about how this noise enters our consciousness, and how it becomes a part of our reality.
I'm going to get deep here, but pretty much everything we experience is made up. Nothing about the world we perceive is real; it is all a construct of our brain presented to us the way our brain wants us to see and experience it. Colours don't exist, temperature doesn't exist (it's high and low energy), balance doesn't exist, tastes doesn't exist, shapes don't exist, etc etc. Every animal on the planet experiences the world completely differently. Think about that. A fly has such an intensive frame rate to its vision that it effectively sees the world in slow motion. All animals experience time dilation differently; the way we experience it is down to our brains. It's an extraordinary subject that has fascinated me for years. I wonder what the world really looks and sounds like if we could some how view it in an unbiased objective way. I suppose there can never be a definitive reality as even the scale we experience reality at can be vastly different, from sub atomic levels, upwards.
Even our decision making, which we also believe we have full autonomy over, is also not the case. Most of the time our brain predecides which action to take, and then presents that idea to our conscious awareness, giving the illusion of a free decision. There is a debate whether we have free will at all. Here is a famous experiment which demonstrates how our brain decides what to do before we actively make a decision:
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.wired.com/2008/04/mind-decision/amp
So, I suppose my point regarding tinnitus is that we are dealing with something that is extraordinarily complex. There is more to how we experience our tinnitus than we think. It's a very complex issue.
Member
. You have a real sparkle to your personality. No wonder your introductory thread is so long; it could be turned into a book 
