From My Research, It Still Seems It's Mostly Speculation About What Causes Tinnitus

From my research, it still seems that there is mostly speculation about what causes tinnitus. For example, we know that loud noise exposure can cause tinnitus, i.e. it can cause our bodies to make this unusual noise. Migraines can cause tinnitus, Menieres disease can cause tinnitus. It's thought by the general public that this ''sound'' is coming from our ears, but if you cut the auditory nerve, people can still hear it. So I've read that it's actually some kind of damage to the part of the brain that processes sound? So while we know that certain things cause your ears to ring, we don't really know what is technically happening when a person ears ring, correct?

Personally, if it was solely from sound damage, I'd think there would be a consistent quality to the sound, but for most tinnitus sufferers (me included), sometimes the tinnitus is very loud, but occasionally it is so quiet, I can barely hear it. And people that have Menieres, they have tinnitus without any noise damage. If I did permanent damage to the auditory system, wouldn't it always be a certain volume always? Recently I developed a new tone in my left ear, that wasn't there previously. Now is that from new noise exposure damage or is there something else going on? One night in June, my right ear started to ring amazing loud in the middle of the night, for hours, and then about 8 am, just quit! It's just confusing!

Merely thinking out loud. Is there some research on the cause that I'm unaware of?

 

@Mark P

Hey, I hear ya... my tinnitus is also believed to the idiopathic. There's thing phantom sound that gets louder and quieter, but somehow there's not really any hearing loss indicated on a hearing test... Otoacoustic emissions test does show a slight anomaly, but that's about it. X-rays and MRI's all normal. FU Tinnitus, is all I gotta say. Humans need a firmware update to deal with these developer bugs.

Reason why you can still hear T even after you cut the auditory nerve is because T is believed to eventually manifest itself in the brain, like phantom time or a phantom limb, tinnitus is also this phantom sound. Still so much left to research though. Hopefully soon, a breakthrough.