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Comment by javajosh | Hacker News Reader

I can hear CRTs and some lighting fixtures. It's a super high pitch. Not painful - and is only useful to verify that a CRT is getting power on powerup, before it's display turns on.

I hypothesize that if these people had some unusually high metallic content in the skin/bone in/around their inner ear that moves slightly in response to EMR then that might actually do something to them, like trigger complex migraines. You'd need two highly unlikely (and unlucky) problems for this to be real, but it's not exactly the same as Morgellons[1]. Also, tooth fillings + bone conduction can pick up radio signals, so I'm not sure why these people are being dismissed so quickly as psychiatric cases.

Diane's demanding nature sounds like it caused more problems for her than her condition.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgellons

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What you are hearing is plain old sound - higher frequency, in the ranges we tend to lose first with time and age. In both the TV and light fixtures, you are hearing the transformer coils physically shifting.

I hear them too.

Tooth fillings and bone conduction could pick up AM signals, because of the nature of AM.

Getting older and losing these frequencies has been a blessing. Switch power supplies and old school LCD screens (or the switching power supply used to power them), like those on my palm pilot and other electronics used to really bug me when I young. I am sure modern LED light fixtures would have driven me crazy.

I am sure I cannot appreciate music as well, in fact I have sold almost all my high end audio gear, but I will take the lack of high-frequency sounds in everyday life over slightly better range when listening to music.

I have Hue lights in my house and can't hear them. But I can hear CFLs and it's piercing.

I'm not sure they cannot also do FM. The argument I usually see against FM is that demodulating FM is much more complicated, but that is not really true. Demodulating FM accurately is much more complicated, but if you'll accept a fairly distorted result then an AM demodulator can be used to demodulate FM.

You just tune the AM demodulator off center from the FM signal. This is called slope detection. If you have an SDR you can play around with this. Here's an article on slope detection [1].

I think this only works if the bandwidth of the AM detector is fairly small compared to the FM signal. I have no idea what the bandwidth of tooth filling receivers is.

[1] http://www.radio-electronics.com/info/rf-technology-design/f...

It's the fly-back transformer. For TV CRT's it's around 15kHz, monitor CRT's are higher. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyback_transformer.

Yeah I can hear CRTs anywhere in the house. Drives me crazy how loud they are. CFLS can be pretty bad too.

I go out of my way to find amperage controlled LED fixtures because they seem to be the only light source that doesn't hum.

Worse are those ultrasonic occupancy sensors. In some spots i the room I can hear a really high pitched buzzing noise. I think it has to with beat frequencies and the caps they use to step up the frequency internally.

People with Morgellons actually have an itch, we just don't know what the cause is or how to stop it; and they are resistant to any psychological treatment that aims to reduce the itch because they think you're accusing them of making it up. We do know that Morgellons is not any insect or alien creature.

I have more sympathy for people with Morgellons than for the electro-sensitives (apart from the fantastic amounts of stigma about mental illness they generate - both from people looking in but also from themselves.)

Good article with some ideas: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/8626767/Morgellons-Di...

I'd approach this article very carefully:

The fibres didn't match any of the 85,000 organic substances they had on their files. "I was both shocked and not shocked," recalls Wymore. "I already thought these fibres were kind of unusual, and this just validated it."

Wymore has now been working on the DNA of the fibres for five years. So far, none of the samples he has sent into the laboratory has proved to be anything mysterious. Results have included nylon, cotton, a human hair, a fungal fibre and a rodent hair.

The author moves on to another "expert" without pressing Wymore for either the status of the non-matches or an explanation of why human hair was not part of their 85,000-large library.

The part where he digs needles from his body and put them in a jar to show his wife who can't see anything in a jar reminded me of "A scanner darkly". Where a character is convinced he has lices and spends a whole day finding them and putting them in a jar just to find out later that the jar is empty.

I can also hear some CRT TVs. I have never heard any other type of CRT, though.

Are you sure they don't simply emit 20+ kHz sound?

>Are you sure they don't simply emit 20+ kHz sound?

They do. Sorry, didn't mean to imply high metal content in the inner was responsible for both phenomena. Was just trying to give the benefit of the doubt to these people's claims; it sort of bothers me when "science" is quick to dismiss people's claims. I'm sure a lot of people would call me (us) crazy for thinking we can hear such a high pitch - but since it's kind of unimportant trivia, like being able to roll your tongue, it doesn't matter. If hearing the high pitch was the cause of great suffering, being called crazy to think that was the cause would hurt a great deal more, I imagine.

Well, "science" hasn't been very quick to dismiss EM-sensitivity. There has been done many experiments. The subjects usually can't tell if EM equipment has power or not from their symptoms.

This does not lessen the problems or make them less real, but it suggests the treatment looks more like treating a thin person convinced he is fat, than like treating allergies, for example.

By the way, the ability to hear CRTs is common among young people with good hearing. Many switched PSUs make high pitched noises too, for example. Nosie pollution is quite a problem, and there's been studies that suggests links between noise even slightly in the ultrasound and stress levels.

I think most "electronic noise" is related to coil whine [1]. Although I can imagine that the hsync frequency of cathode ray tubes can cause audible noise. That would explain why you could hear CRT TVs but not CRT monitors. If you take the NTSC standard you can calculate ~15kHz for hsync frequency which is audible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coil_noise

Does the TV have speakers? Most do. You can get audible frequencies leaking onto the audio line and emitting noise. My LCD monitor has built in speakers that I never use and have turned "off", but every once in a while I hear a hiss from them.

That is noise inherent in the (low quality) audio amplifier.

I doubt it's what's going on with most TVs (especially since LCD TVs don't seem to have this problem), but my old, cheap TV tuner card emits a 15.9kHz squeal on its line out, so it's not impossible.

I never thought I could be happy about hearing loss as I got older until I realized that I could no longer hear CRTs. A muted TV in a quiet room was incredibly annoying for me.

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