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Comment by 0hijinks | Hacker News Reader

Tinnitus is sometimes neurological, seemingly caused by the brain compensating for a loss of sensation. I can imagine a horror story in which this just makes it a thousand times worse, on top of permanently losing all hearing.

Now, being able to use a hot-swappable audio sensor instead of an ear made of tissue would be pretty dope.

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Louder than you think, Dad! Louder than you think!

proceeds to rip off ears

I hear that theory but I don't believe it - I have tinnitus. Nothing else in the nervous system behaves that way - lack of light doesn't suddenly make you see blinding light etc. It's much more likely the sound sensor in the ear is jammed in the on position.

There are various explanations about the genesis of the sound for T sufferers, and it obviously depends on the kind of T that one has (this chart [1] helps navigate the variants).

But if you are one of the "common kind", which is typically an insult to your hearing apparatus that damaged your cochlea, then the work from Susan Shore [2] is a reasonable explanation of what could actually be going on (genesis by the fusiform cells of the dorsal cochlear nucleus). You may be interested in checking out her publications listed in the wikipedia article quoted.

[1] https://www.tinnitusresearch.net/index.php/for-clinicians/di... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Shore

Amputees have phantom limb sensations including pain. I believe this is more than theory. Certainly medical science has collected at least some case studies over the past century about people who have had their auditory nerve severed for one reason or another. And, as I recall, the auditory system actually does behave unlike other parts of the nervous system like vision which is more mechanical and less dependent on the brain for basic functionality.

Well, perhaps some but I don't think it's the usual cause. Phantom limb isn't just loss of sensation, it's also having part of the body chopped off. Just having part of your body go numb doesn't usually cause that.

It does and it is called neuropathic pain. Phantom limb is just an extreme case of it, but malfunction or damage to nerves can cause all kinds of phantom “pain”. Experiencing phantom sensations due to nerve damage is well known and widely documented, so phantom sound in the ear due to nerve damage is well in line with that.

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