Auditory Mirror Therapy for Treatment of Tinnitus

Reducing tinnitus loudness is the only thing that matters. With that, the THI score goes down automatically. We need treatments which target tinnitus loudness!

 

Well that's the problem right there. He was using earmuffs, not a mirror.

 

Wouldn’t it be easy enough to test this. You can buy headphones or earbuds with “ambient mode”, e.g. https://blog.taotronics.com/headphones/what-is-ambient-sound-mode-on-headphones/.

Then just swap the left and right and see if it works...

 

I don't get it. If I swap left and right, then the headphones also pick up the ambient noise on the left and right, how fully can you swap that?

 

@PeterPan, yes, that's exactly how they conducted the study. The headphones they used are referenced a few posts back (3M Peltor TacticalPro) so with a pair of those plus a few minutes with a screwdriver and soldering iron, it should be possible to replicate what they did.

 

Oops, you are right. And no manufacturer is going to include the swap feature because (almost) no one will have a need for it (and it also could have safety issues).

I wonder how hard it is to do this? These headphones aren’t cheap!

 

Well, actually it shouldn't be that hard to test. I have a mobile stereo recorder that you can connect headphones to. I'll set it up in the garden and then simply swap on the headphones, which allow enough outside noise to pass through (no over-ear headphones), left and right.

Let's see what comes out. I just think it does nothing in the direction of tinnitus.

 

Thinking out loud...

The Ramachandran mirror box therapy for phantom limb pain is essentially an optical illusion. But the power of utilising one sense to fool other senses has been clearly demonstrated. It's also reminded me of a strange funfair ride called, The Haunted Swing, that I went on as a kid.

One would enter a room and perch inside a gondola-like swing that held about eight people. When the ride started the gondola would gently rock back and forth, and as it did, the room would slowly rotate around the gondola. The effect of this illusion was such that within a couple of seconds it felt as though one was literally hanging upside down in the room defying gravity.

One negative but clearly powerful side-effect of this form of 'bi-modal stimulation' was that riders would often feel sick or even vomit. In such cases the guard's advise would be to just simply close one's eyes. I actually tested this out on more than one occasion and the cancellation of the woozy effect was immediate, albeit to the deprivation of sight.

Where tinnitus is concerned it's been proferred that "a change in the organization of the tonotopic map after exposing the ear to intense noise" occurs. It's also stated that, "By understanding how these changes happen, researchers could develop techniques to bring the map back to normal and relieve tinnitus".

Intriguing. Does the tonotopic map lie at the heart of tinnitus generation? Can it really be that spurious data within the map eventually become permanent giving rise to chronic tinnitus? We can't see sound but could we use a simple sound map with inversions in the same way mirror-boxing uses inversions in light to eventually fool the tonotopic map into resetting itself?

I truly believe in the power of these illusions. I also believe the answer to addressing the malady of tinnitus will come from something simple in nature as a wooden mirror-box for phantom pain, or haunted swing (without the vomit) for kicks. I'm also glad that Clas Linnman at least seems willing to stake his professional reputation on a more simplistic approach. Brave man. If, like Ramachandran, his invention looks like something cobbled together in the garden shed then so be it. I'd still be willing to give it a try!

 

I tested it for several hours (I'm unable to work because of tinnitus and I have time), in different volumes, more surroundings, less surroundings, different sounds.

What a surprise:
It has zero effect on tinnitus (I have classic chronic tinnitus).

 

Looking at the graphic in the original post, looks like you need to do it for at least 40 hours to start seeing some effect (the more the better). How did you get the mirror'ed headphones?

 

What do you mean exactly? Do you want me to answer: rotate the headphones 180 degrees?

 

Hi Toby. My understanding is rotating the headphones 180 won't work as this will also involve rotating the microphones and you will still hear external sound coming from the right in the right headphone.

The idea behind this treatment is that you hear ambient sounds coming from the left in the right headphone and vice versa. So, if someone is on your right and starts talking to you, you hear it in your left ear. So the brain gets auditory signals which conflict with the visual signals and this confuses the brain and maybe has an impact on the tinnitus.

In order to actually test this, you need to modify the headphones (e.g., through soldering) as no headphones on the market are likely to have this feature (it's a huge safety risk for starters!).

Although the test results in the graphic are from a "1-arm" test (i.e. no placebo), to me they look impressive and it would be good to get feedback from people who have the time to test this (although modifying the headphones may present a problem for the average user!).

 

Aha - there you go. I couldn't wrap my head around how they might set up an optical effect for sound But there you have it. Nice one Peter.

Edit - imagine what this 'therapy' would be like utilising the doppler effect coupled together with images of whistling trains going past, for example?

 

@PeterPan, I have a mobile stereo recorder Zoom H4N with simultaneous stereo headphone output. So I just turn the headphones left / right and let them half open over my ears so I get the ambient sounds 50/50.