Why Does Tinnitus Even Exist?

[Ryzen]

Angel Dust's thread prompted me to submit another, similarly basic inquiry: why does tinnitus exist when hearing loss is a natural process of human aging? Even under somatic cases, why would the "complex, brilliant" brain and auditory system respond to the loss of hearing by over-amplifying and holding noise to distressing levels that are completely inconsistent with the rest of the normal, still-healthy frequency range?

In other words, why would the brain react to hearing loss in such a ridiculous way when reduction in hearing is fundamental and inevitable? After 200,000 years of evolution, the brain should know that hair cells can and will degrade permanently, yet it chooses to address this by "compensating" for it (which it does horribly) instead of just accepting the loss?

 

[Vicki14]

I couldn't agree more and ask myself this every day!!! An extremely hellish design that should've been recalled years ago!!!!!!

 

[jasonbourne]

Because any "bugs" in evolution that doesn't impact survival or reproduction stays. Just like chronic pain and especially male pattern baldness. Most men go bald way after they reproduce which is why like 50% of men are bald by 50 (you better believe that if men went bald at 14 that shit would not be with us today, it's a repulsive thing before men could shave with razors and even then it still sucks).

I mean it's fucked up that birds evolved before us yet they can regenerate hearing but we can't just because of some inbred common ancestor.

 

[attheedgeofscience]

After 200,000 years of evolution, the brain should know that hair cells can and will degrade permanently, yet it chooses to address this by "compensating" for it (which it does horribly) instead of just accepting the loss?

Evolution only plays a part when a medical condition prevents an individual from having children (e.g. because of premature death). Getting rid of defect offspring is Mother Nature's way of keeping the gene pool clean. But that doesn't apply to tinnitus (except in the case of early suicide). That's one reason why tinnitus is still around.

why does tinnitus exist when hearing loss is a natural process of human aging?

Well... believe it or not, but tinnitus can serve a useful function through stochastic resonance (stochastic resonance allows a sound signal too weak to be audible to be perceived when mixed with another source of sound that can be heard i.e. tinnitus). This was covered in the Frontiers Research Topic:

• https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2016.00597/full
  
• https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2017.00031/full

So... put another way: tinnitus allows you to hear better in the event of worsening hearing thresholds.

 

[Vicki14]

So... put another way: tinnitus allows you to hear better in the event of worsening hearing thresholds.

Shame we're not given a choice.... I'd rather have reduced hearing than listen to this mind numbing shit!

 

[Manny]

I couldn't agree more and ask myself this every day!!! An extremely hellish design that should've been recalled years ago!!!!!!

I don't mean to start no flame wars but yeah this makes me atheistic AF

 

[Vicki14]

I don't mean to start no flame wars but yeah this makes me atheistic AF

Understandable.... and a believer that the darker side exists....

 

[Manny]

Understandable.... and a believer that the darker side exists....

Interesting, you mean like an evil God or something?

 

[Vicki14]

Interesting, you mean like an evil God or something?

Evil. As that's what this is. Pure torturous evil.

 

[Manny]

Evil. As that's what this is. Pure torturous evil.

Yup. Base and unadulterated.
Hugs cause that's all I can offer. ://

 

[Vicki14]

Yup. Base and unadulterated.
Hugs cause that's all I can offer. ://

Thank you. I'll gladly take them and reciprocate. Me too, I'm all out of positivity

 

[InfiniteLoop]

@Ryzen

This topic has come out multiple times. The brain and auditory system are able to adapt to a slow and gradual loss of hearing like the well know age related decay that happens to every single human being. It seems that a more sudden loss is needed to induce the maladaptive neuroplasticity characteristic of tinnitus. Acoustic trauma, brain trauma, virus infection, etc.... can be unfortunate triggers for the malady that consumes our lives.

 

[JohnAdams]

All diseases an ddeath itself exist because of this:

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+3&version=KJV

"And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat"

FACT.

 

[Angel Dust]

It makes no sense to me either. It's hell on Earth. If I die by my own hand, I will more than likely encounter eternal bliss, despite my many sins, having already walked through hell on Earth.

I was talking about suicide to someone I've known for many years last night. She's a believer in the after life and reincarnation and karma and all of that. And she said that people that take their own lives sentence themselves to an afterlife of pain even worse than they experienced while they were alive. The rationale is, she said, that your life is not yours to take, but a gift from God that we have to cherish and celebrate, no matter what.

She also said that if you interfere with God's plan through suicide and you were supposed to live to be 80 but killed yourself at 45, then you're supposed to suffer for those 35 years by watching the pain you caused your family and friends, by not being allowed to move on in the afterlife until the day your were supposed to die arrives. She said that the physical pain you suffered on Earth can also be felt, ten times worse, by your soul if you kill yourself. Go figure.

Which... to be honest, sounds too cruel. So...let me get this straight, you are telling me that for whatever reason I have been condemned to suffer on Earth, yet if I kil myself to escape pain, I will suffer even more? that does not sound like the kind of God I was raised to believe in.

*sigh*

 

[Bam]

It makes no sense to me either. It's hell on Earth. If I die by my own hand, I will more than likely encounter eternal bliss, despite my many sins, having already walked through hell on Earth.

I was talking about suicide to someone I've known for many years last night. She's a believer in the after life and reincarnation and karma and all of that. And she said that people that take their own lives sentence themselves to an afterlife of pain even worse than they experienced while they were alive. The rationale is, she said, that your life is not yours to take, but a gift from God that we have to cherish and celebrate, no matter what.

She also said that if you interfere with God's plan through suicide and you were supposed to live to be 80 but killed yourself at 45, then you're supposed to suffer for those 35 years by watching the pain you caused your family and friends, by not being allowed to move on in the afterlife until the day your were supposed to die arrives. She said that the physical pain you suffered on Earth can also be felt, ten times worse, by your soul if you kill yourself. Go figure.

Which... to be honest, sounds too cruel. So...let me get this straight, you are telling me that for whatever reason I have been condemned to suffer on Earth, yet if I kil myself to escape pain, I will suffer even more? that does not sound like the kind of God I was raised to believe in.

*sigh*

Ask your friend what happens to the countless sick and frankly just old people who are euthanised. Does she seriously think for example the 75 year old ex nurse who spent her whole life caring for others but was watching her life go down the shitter with dementia and funnily enough tinnitus and went to dignitas, is going to suffer in this afterlife hell she is talking of?!!...... I call bullshit.

And she sounds like a heartless emotionally blackmailing selfish piece of shit for even saying this stuff to you in your current situation. IMHO.

 

[Contrast]

Angel Dust's thread prompted me to submit another, similarly basic inquiry: why does tinnitus exist when hearing loss is a natural process of human aging? Even under somatic cases, why would the "complex, brilliant" brain and auditory system respond to the loss of hearing by over-amplifying and holding noise to distressing levels that are completely inconsistent with the rest of the normal, still-healthy frequency range?

In other words, why would the brain react to hearing loss in such a ridiculous way when reduction in hearing is fundamental and inevitable? After 200,000 years of evolution, the brain should know that hair cells can and will degrade permanently, yet it chooses to address this by "compensating" for it (which it does horribly) instead of just accepting the loss?

why did mammals lose the ability to regenerate cochlear hair cells?

reptiles+birds and all other vetebrates can regenerate hair cells.

Evolution is not an intelligent process, the fossil record will never tell us where tinnitus and phantom sensations originated. If scientist could prove a non mammal could get tinnitus or phantom pain it would show how far back in time the condition goes.

 

[Agrajag364]

Angel Dust's thread prompted me to submit another, similarly basic inquiry: why does tinnitus exist when hearing loss is a natural process of human aging? Even under somatic cases, why would the "complex, brilliant" brain and auditory system respond to the loss of hearing by over-amplifying and holding noise to distressing levels that are completely inconsistent with the rest of the normal, still-healthy frequency range?

In other words, why would the brain react to hearing loss in such a ridiculous way when reduction in hearing is fundamental and inevitable? After 200,000 years of evolution, the brain should know that hair cells can and will degrade permanently, yet it chooses to address this by "compensating" for it (which it does horribly) instead of just accepting the loss?

As @attheedgeofscience implies, evolution is an imperfect designer and does not design organisms without physical weaknesses. Sometimes there are trade-offs (competing selective pressures) in its design processes and ultimately it only cares if you can stay alive for long enough to produce offspring and if those offspring can produce offspring etc.

When a debilitating symptom is frequent in a population, sometimes there is an evolutionary trade-off going on.I can think of one evolutionary mechanism that might explain tinnitus. It's very frequent for people to have tinnitus in one ear only or for it to be far louder in one ear. One study i foud showed that 50% of people with tinnitus had unilateral tinnitus.

Now why might that be? Tinnitus is described as a response to hearing loss, the death of inner ear cells-a tinnitus specialising ENT told me that the brain turns up the "auditory gain"-basically, cranks up the volume to try to restore the hearing, and tinnitus i.e. hearing your internal body noise, can be the result A while ago another user posted a study that suggested something to the effect that the brain deeply dislikes asymmetric hearing loss and this auditory gain i.e. cranking up the internal volume is often a response to asymmetric hearing loss. To me, this would explain why unilateral tinnitus was so very common. Apologies as I can't find the original reference which is somewhere on my laptop, will edit post if I can find it.

In evolutionary terms, it would actually make perfect sense that the brain would "dislike" asymmetrical hearing and there would be very strong evolutionary selective pressures for a mechanism that helps to correct this. One proposed selective pressure for this– speculative on my part – is as follows.Mechanisms to evade predation are very strongly selected for, and one of these would be the ability to detect here predators approaching from behind. Even hearing would be important in this ability. Many of the things that go on in our brain did not evolve after we became humans but millions of years beforehand in ancestral species.

I Emphasise again that that last paragraph is theoretical but I'm going to come back and try to reference my post when I'm on my laptop. One might wonder whether tinnitus it mself interferes with the detections of sound behind an individual but I believe that studies have shown that tinnitus does not interfere very much with our perception of sound in itself. It's may be that the brain is often able to correct subtle asymmetries in hearing without creating tinnitus and tinnitus is what happens when it overshoots. But again this bit is speculative

 

[Don Tinny]

This has taken away my faith in God, I must admit it. Sometimes I like to think that having tinnitus makes me a "better person", but as soon as I have a series of good days, my old personality (a bit superficial) resurfaces. The good thing is that having this condition makes my daughter less likely to suffer from it, because I will know how to explain the risks of noise exposure, something my parents did not do. However, I suppose that by that time we will have a true cure / treatment (she is 4 years old now).

It seems that life is a lottery. And we are all predisposed to different health problems. Many people hurt their ears and do not have tinnitus, we do. But they are surely predisposed to have other problems, perhaps not so horrible but also annoying and limiting.

 

[Contrast]

Shame we're not given a choice.... I'd rather have reduced hearing than listen to this mind numbing shit!

you do, what he meant was tinnitus reacting would make up for the reduced hearing in a very crude way.

 

[Tinniger]

The extent to which tinnitus and hearing loss are related is highly controversial.
It is only one of the modern theses, that tinnitus is a phantom sound of the hearing centre in the brain which is undersupplied with input because of hair cell damage.
It is possible that this thesis is correct, - but certainly not for all tinnitus sufferers. And nobody knows the percentage where this thesis is not true.

 

[Red]

Evolution only plays a part when a medical condition prevents an individual from having children (e.g. because of premature death). Getting rid of defect offspring is Mother Nature's way of keeping the gene pool clean. But that doesn't apply to tinnitus (except in the case of early suicide). That's one reason why tinnitus is still around.

Yes, yes, this. I've in the past wondered how such a high percentage of women die during childbirth pre-modern era could make sense on an evolutionary level. Surely, it would be more beneficial in nature to have both parents. But evolution doesn't care about the life of the adult, only that it carried on viable and successful offspring. Humans are very social and a child can just be raised by someone else in the 'pack.'

My favorite example is the luna moth. A beautiful moth who, as an adult, has no mouth and has to mate before they slowly die from starvation. Nature can be cruel.

 

[Finnigan]

Because like so many health conditions, once a theory becomes normalized ( mainstreamed ) it some how becomes fact. The idea that hearing loss causes T is so utterly stupid. It's like saying blindness causes sight.

 

[Finnigan]

My Dad had major hearing loss because of aircraft noise and he never got Tinnitus. I know no one with T that had any hearing loss or problems prior to getting T

 

[Bam]

The idea that hearing loss causes T is so utterly stupid.

Ooooh! @JohnAdams is going to hunt you down and give you a lecture on hearing regeneration and lost frequency compensation for this!

 

[JohnAdams]

Ooooh! @JohnAdams is going to hunt you down and give you a lecture on hearing regeneration and lost frequency compensation for this!

Well what do you think?

 

[Bam]

Well what do you think?

I have no clue John. You're my go to guy for this stuff. I basically flunked every science class going so all I can do is believe smarter people and hope they're not actually fucking stupid.

 

[JohnAdams]

I have no clue John. You're my go to guy for this stuff. I basically flunked every science class going so all I can do is believe smarter people and hope they're not actually fucking stupid.

I think it can because by any disruption in the system from the hair cell all the way to the auditory cortex.
My opinion though is that for those of us with that tinnitus started by being exposed to loud noises that the problem is in fact with the hair cell or nerve synapse connected to it.

 

[Bam]

I think it can because by any disruption in the system from the hair cell all the way to the auditory cortex.
My opinion though is that for those of us with that tinnitus started by being exposed to loud noises that the problem is in fact with the hair cell or nerve synapse connected to it.

Yeah I'm a weird case. I've definitely been exposed to shit loads of noise because of my upbringing and career.....both unconventionally sporadically noisy. Although nothing like constant factory or industrial noise.

But my T didnt start because of a noise trauma event and I was actually asleep when it came on.

 

[Finnigan]

Ooooh! @JohnAdams is going to hunt you down and give you a lecture on hearing regeneration and lost frequency compensation for this!

Lol sorry. But I still think they idea of loss causing loud is far fetched theory. And theory is exactly what it is. Meanwhile, this horrendous condition continues for thousand unaffected by any previous hearing loss whatsoever.

 

[Bam]

Lol sorry. But I still think they idea of loss causing loud is far fetched theory. And theory is exactly what it is. Meanwhile, this horrendous condition continues for thousand unaffected by any previous hearing loss whatsoever.

Well for what it's worth I'm pretty sure T is a demonic curse. And you either get let off the hook by some higher power or you suffer hell on earth for the rest of your natural life....merry Xmas everyone!!.