An Interview with Lola De La Mata about tinnitus
thequietus.com
thequietus.com
Have you considered moving to one of those places near a radio observatory where people aren't allowed to use electronics?
I can't tell what brand I'm using because I (unhelpfully for this case) throw away the box and just keep them in the plastic bag they come in, but every 6 months or so I'll go to Fred Meyer, Target, or Walmart and buy a big pack of the most expensive earplugs that say "sleep" on the box :-)
Pray for me as I am stuck in an apartment building with a regular 50hz hum for the foreseeable.
* Eargasm -- Do not recommend, they're really hard to get a seal, the noise protection seems worse than advertised, and if it's hot and you sweat they fall out and getting a seal again is a huge PITA.
* Etymotic ER20 -- Highly recommend, super easy to get a seal, good sound quality, good nose reduction. The only negative is they're a little hard to get used to since they go really deep in your ears and they're hard plastic. Some people it really bothers when they borrow them.
* Loop -- Also highly recommend, I would spend the extra for the thing you put in the middle that gives you the extra dB reduction. These plugs are weird AF but they sit on the outside of your ear, are very comfortable, stay sealed, and don't fall out because they use your own ear to hold it in.
* Vibes -- They had the same problems as the Eargasms for me but also reduced noise less. Might be worth for "above average loudness social event" but for actually loud events I couldn't use them.
* Any Noise Cancelling -- Hate these fuckers. I've tried so many of them but they all make me feel like I'm in an airplane and they make me hear my tinnitus worse. It's not like it's louder but something about the noise cancelling makes me focus on it more. I'm sure they're great for regular ears but they can't cancel the noise coming from inside the house.
* Dark horse pick that aren't actually high-fidelity are 3M E-A-R UltraFit Corded Ear Plugs those bright neon yellow things with the blue cord. Ugly as sin but really effective. Super cheap too. In slightly noisy environments I keep them a little bit unsealed. They're my backup for when I need more dB reduction than high-fidelity filters can provide.
I'm scheduled for an appointment with an audiologist to get the custom molded -25 dB plugs. I think the woman said they'd be like $200 but I wanted something I could take to like concert concerts.
(For sleeping I buy the Leight Laser Lite in bulk because anything with a stiff/solid stem tends to be uncomfortable. They also work reasonably well in gig scenarios.)
https://www.moldex.com/product/sparkplugs/
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I feel like I am at the ansolute maximum with them, but I would always like more silence.
If you live in the typical American configuration of a house with a garage that is near the kitchen, consider putting your fridge/freezer out there. Sure, it's a few steps of inconvenience, but you'll find the lack of noisy appliances a true consolation. If you really need quick access to something refrigerated, put a cooler in a corner of the kitchen, and make ice with the freezer that's in the garage.
Truly silent refrigerators exist, but you won't find them at your typical home improvement box store. (Ask me why I know this!) Look into Amish appliance suppliers. Or the tiny-house folks who've found quiet, compact absorption-based fridges.
Most propane fridges are absorption style. I don't know if they're up to code for running inside a house, but they'd probably be fine on a porch or in a garage.
Check out Lehman's (https://www.lehmans.com/category/gas-refrigerators-freezers) for a lot of alternative technology.
Otherwise, google for 'propane refrigerator' or 'gas refrigerator or 'absorption refrigerator.'
If you really want to get creative, and enjoy processing food, there's lots of fridge-free ways to preserve food, depending on the climate you live in. It's also a fun area to research and experiment with.
Oh, one more thing -- chest freezers can be converted to chest fridges with a simple thermostat-switch. As most cheap chest freezers are manual-defrost style, they tend to run their compressor less, and for whatever reason, aren't as noisy as standing fridges. I personally still wouldn't want one in my main living quarters, but as they tend to be pretty cheap to buy, it might be something to try.
I read this and I think that others must think that I am difficult to live with. It's not like I'm wincing all day or bitching at others to keep it down. The inside of our house is a sanctuary of silence, for the most part, after lots of trial and error with AC ducting, appliances, insulation. It's all of the other sounds that seem to sneak in through our old walls that are maddening.
The most mind-blowing moment, not only for De La Mata but the scientists too, came when they managed to actually record the sounds that she heard in her ears – which now appear as ‘Left Ear’ and ‘Right Ear’ which begin sides A and B on the album – and in doing so opened up questions about the nature of tinnitus itself. “The NHS definition is that it’s a phantom sound that your brain is creating, that it isn’t something ‘real’, so you should try to ignore it.” By having De La Mata place her ear into an anechoic chamber, with an ultra-sensitive microphone perched in her ear canal, they were able to provide significant evidence to the contrary. “After the first recording of it, it was ‘There’s no way, this isn’t possible.’” They tried again with her breath held, and again with her tensing her ears, and again with other members of staff, but each time it became apparent that yes, the noises De La Mata hears are seemingly something physical.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK580483/#:~:text=Otoaco....
What‘s different from me (neurodivergent?) feeling pain from loud noise and others (neurotypicals?) not?
I do, to an extent, blame the venues for concerts for not indicating that hearing damage is possible. At 16, it's not something you would even consider. At the bare minimum, offer earplugs when you're checking tickets. A lot of smaller, grassroots festivals do.
Edit: I mean someone who specializes in hearing.
It may be dumb but I had things to manage like work and children in their teens, so tinnitus management had a low priority. Still, I look avidly at discussions about tinnitus. I tried the method of tapping on the neck, but it did not work for me. I tried hearing aids, but it didn't help either.
I have the same. So much so that I now rely on its intensity when I wake up to gauge how well I slept at night.
As they get louder, I can easily hear them over tinnitus. The cicada sound itself is interesting. Distant ones combine to make a sort of steady hum, almost a whistling noise. Ones that are close by make a distinctive sharp wavering buzzing noise. The sounds are distinctive and there doesn't seem to be any in between.
Part of the cochlear amplifier mechanism is cells which move in response to electrical signals so you can hook them to a sound system for a laugh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXgFae2r1s8
Tinnitus other people can hear has a name - objective tinnitus - and is a thing though less common than subjective tinnitus which they can't.
Vid on the cells making sounds https://youtu.be/b_3AngVJzp8?t=645
As an aside the explanations I've read of what the amplifier cells do seem wrong to me in that they say they make the sound louder. From an engineering point of view you'd imagine it would make more sense to provide negative feedback loop so the membrane doesn't move too much and overload the ion channel gate which must only have a useful movement range of a few nm.
Some audio cleaning tools can do the same if applied incorrectly.
It makes sense hearing loss would make this worse. Less signal more gain needs to be applied.
I love loud music right down to my core, but when I was in my early 20s it was already clear that many of my musical heroes were going deaf. The general rule is not to listen to anything in your headphones so loud that you can't detect conversation nearby. Another principle is if people can your music on headphones from more than a yard or two away, it's too loud.
So what it cost me was not cranking up my favorite music when listening. I grew accustomed a much lower volume than I enjoy. It wasn't hard, like getting used to decaf coffee or Diet Coke over sugary Coke. I go to a few concerts a year and don't ear earplugs.
Overall it's been very worth it and the cost has been minimal.
I mean instead of sitting in silence, use your ears to hear conversations, to locate things in space, to discern things.
A friend had ear problems, and he delayed getting a hearing aid for years. He said he lost the ability to discern conversations because he put things off too long.
This is not my experience. I've had tinnitus my entire life, and it's more of a phantom sound (cf. phantom limb) than a something that competes with sounds in the real world. That is, if there is any real noise like speech it basically gets muted. In a completely quiet environment however the ringing sensation can be comparable to high pitch TV static. The quieter the environment, the louder it gets.
I don't notice it in normal day to day life, but at night when it's quiet at bedtime, it manifests as a high pitched ringing in both ears. For this reason I prefer to run a fan or something that generates white noise at night, which masks it somewhat.
But I don’t care about it. I wonder if I have a tinnitus or not.
Interestingly enough, it doesn't really bother me unless I'm seeking it out, so I wonder if my young brain just adapted to it.
Another weird fact about me is that I can hear things (I'm 35) that lots of people can't. I can definitely hear switching power supplies in everything (well, almost everything - really high quality electronics mostly seem to be exempt). I also know when bats are around, because I can hear a "clicking" noise from whatever their echolocation-producing organ is. I don't think I can hear the echolocation itself, but there is a very distinctive clicking that they make in the process.
He told me that many audiologists in this specialty believe there is a class of people with sensitive hearing, who are more perceptive to threshold changes in hearing (hence tinnitus). But there’s been no real research on it.
I’m not sure to what extent I believe it (given audiology is somewhere close to physiotherapy in terms of rigour)
(After party i got quite sick with bacterial infection, and that caused me to go few doctors, one I think sixth doctor audiologist recommended to me MRI, as this is quite rare)
You obviously need some kind of energy source (either an active amplifier or a noisy pump source) to have resonances that can be recorded. What would that be for tinnitus? Blood flow noise?
Well it turns out that there is thought to be active amplification in mammalian ears, via the outer hair cells. They have some sort of active motor protein setup that is thought to physically amplify incoming sounds. So you can get a self-sustaining resonance that way. A healthy ear will emit sounds from spurious or resonant activation of these motor proteins.
Apparently this is thought to cause a minority of cases of tinnitus.
I looked into if I could buy probe microphones to test my own ears. Looks like Etymotic sells a couple in the $1500 range (as of the mid-90s), presumably more expensive now. Couldn't find any good deals on used lab-grade probe microphones online.
I don’t think cauterization is the answer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VePV-gsNBNc
I feel like maybe the brain fills in the missing frequencies from damaged hair cells or pinched nerves and hallucinates the sound. Like in this Coke can red-cyan color illusion:
https://www.reddit.com/r/opticalillusions/comments/1cc8cwp/c...
Reddit regrettably makes it hard to link directly to images, so here's one you can zoom yourself with command/control +/- for proof:
https://gagadget.com/en/446542-a-photo-of-a-coca-cola-can-th...
Maybe a hearing aid could be set up to amplify the frequencies near the whine and dampen the rest. Kind of like adding cyan to the can so that it no longer appears red. Or removing cyan from the surrounding image.
I just tried doing a deep dive on how hair cells work, but I'm just seeing a bunch of research papers. It mainly says that they don't grow back after dying. I thought that the frequency they detected was based on their location in the cochlea, but it sounds like they have a random distribution of resonant frequencies instead.
Maybe gene therapy could be used to increase or re-roll the hair cell randomness so that other cells could take over for the missing ones. Or maybe a drug could make them grow or shrink slightly at random to change their resonant frequencies, like how eating biotin makes your hair grow.
Knowing nothing about this, I wish there was a way for people who geek out on stuff to be able to solve a bunch of random problems and make rent, like in a think tank. I get so bored and tired of working on the same old CRUD apps day after day as tech gets more marginalized with ever-increasing workload for the same pay.
On the cover, this article looks like pesudo-scientific hogwash and a marketing puff piece for some artist's album. It drones on and on.
But this morsel could be absolutely groundbreaking if true:
> The most mind-blowing moment, not only for De La Mata but the scientists too, came when they managed to actually record the sounds that she heard in her ears – which now appear as ‘Left Ear’ and ‘Right Ear’ which begin sides A and B on the album – and in doing so opened up questions about the nature of tinnitus itself. “The NHS definition is that it’s a phantom sound that your brain is creating, that it isn’t something ‘real’, so you should try to ignore it.” By having De La Mata place her ear into an anechoic chamber, with an ultra-sensitive microphone perched in her ear canal, they were able to provide significant evidence to the contrary. “After the first recording of it, it was ‘There’s no way, this isn’t possible.’” They tried again with her breath held, and again with her tensing her ears, and again with other members of staff, but each time it became apparent that yes, the noises De La Mata hears are seemingly something physical.
Is this actually real, or was this made up? Was it simply amplified blood flow, CSF, or some other biological and unrelated phenomena? Is anyone looking into this?
This is the absolutely wrong window dressing and treatment for this kind of news and investigation. This shouldn't be puffed up marketing, but should instead be in scientific news circles and in the hands of principal investigators.
I'm skeptical, but maybe there's a valid line of research here that could result in a treatment for lots of impacted people.
Here's the part that describes the discovery:
> The most mind-blowing moment, not only for De La Mata but the scientists too, came when they managed to actually record the sounds that she heard in her ears – which now appear as ‘Left Ear’ and ‘Right Ear’ which begin sides A and B on the album – and in doing so opened up questions about the nature of tinnitus itself. “The NHS definition is that it’s a phantom sound that your brain is creating, that it isn’t something ‘real’, so you should try to ignore it.” By having De La Mata place her ear into an anechoic chamber, with an ultra-sensitive microphone perched in her ear canal, they were able to provide significant evidence to the contrary. “After the first recording of it, it was ‘There’s no way, this isn’t possible.’” They tried again with her breath held, and again with her tensing her ears, and again with other members of staff, but each time it became apparent that yes, the noises De La Mata hears are seemingly something physical. More intriguingly still, the two women whose ears were recorded, De La Mata and Lana Norris – the musicologist whose voice appears on the album’s ‘PINK Noise’, and who is also a choral director – were the only two people whose ears were found to produce spontaneous otoacoustic emissions. “It’s something to do with hormone difference, but they don’t really know why,” De La Mata says. Present in most children but believed to fade over time, they’re also found far more in musicians than in other adults, for reasons yet unknown. It all raises a lot of questions. “What I have is tinnitus by the definition we have now, but maybe that’s not correct. Maybe it’s something else,” De La Mata wonders aloud.
Is there an academic followup to this? I would imagine that this is a pretty major anatomical/medical discovery and that the discoverers would want to write a paper about it.
"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
EDIT why the downvotes? I’m honestly on the edge of deleting my account here at this point
I did a quick search but, once again, as a non-expert, I have no idea what to search for and don't see any solid results showing one way or another. I didn't downvote you, but if you make a claim and back it up with an interesting link, that tends to do a lot better.