Intensively Focusing on Learning Music by Ear Until I'm Brain Dead Turns Off My Tinnitus Completely

Hey guys, I haven't been on here for a while but thought I would chime in and just add some more info in case someone in a position to help reads this.

First a bit of a background: Got audio based tinnitus a few years ago by spending too many hours in a row recording music. Pulled out my in-ear headphones after a multi-day session and bam, I had tinnitus. I went through all the hell most people do, went to doctors, tried prednisone, sound therapy, even participated in Auris Medical study and got injections in my ears. All to no avail. Eventually just got used to it.

Lucky for me, from the onset, I would have about 1 day a week of complete silence and the trend has stayed the same over the years. And sleep often triggers it on or off. To this day I still get about 1 day of silence a week and the rest of the time I have it and ignore it.

Over the years though I have repeatedly came across the same correlation of intensively focusing on learning music and the effects it has on making it disappear. And once again today, I practiced re-learning songs on guitar that I wrote a long time ago and forgot. I have to go back and listen to recordings and learn them by ear.

There are a lot of complex parts and it requires intensive focus for me to learn them. And I do this for hours, over and over, to the point of exhaustion. I overdo it, until I am totally brain dead. I get into that zone where you are so tired, your sleep disappears and you are just wired.

Whenever I have these types of sessions, my tinnitus simply disappears to complete silence. I posted about this couple of years ago when I first noticed it and it's happened repeatedly since. I was actually having a real bad tinnitus day last night where it was louder than it's been in some time to the point where it annoyed me and couldn't fall asleep. And today when I finished the session, and finally stopped and became aware of my surroundings, I realized once again, it's completely gone. So I thought I would chime back in.

It seems that exactly what caused me to get it in the first place, is also what can make it disappear. Overdoing creating and analyzing music. I want to emphasize that, because listening is passive. Leisurely listening to music does not have this effect. What I do requires intensive brain power and lots of brain "memory bank" access (reading and writing to and from memory).

What I am thinking is, because of whatever damage happens, the brain must be generating one or more missing frequencies. But whenever I focus intensively on other sounds, to the point that I get exhausted, the brain gets tired and shuts off whatever functions it keeps on that creates the tinnitus frequencies and uses the last bit of energy and activity on learning.

Either that or perhaps it's like a stuffed nose, and whenever I listen to a million different notes for hours on end, it floods the aural circuits and unclogs whatever the heck it's blocked.

A good study would be to take people who have tinnitus and experience silence days, and scan brain activity when they have tinnitus and then also scan when people have silence, and see if there is some way to figure out what takes place. Obviously it would be a tricky study, since people would have to go in at random times whenever they get silence.

 

Interesting!

I also think that the "good day / bad day" phenomenon is understudied, and if it could be better understood, if what conspired to make a "good day" could be identified, it would be easier to have more of them.

 

This is interesting and gives me hope because I' a writer and right now it feels like I'll never be able to write. I've always needed total silence. Maybe I can try getting lost in writing instead of writing it off...

 

When you don't think about tinnitus it is less noticeable. When you're on Tinnitus Talk and not distracted, tinnitus seems much worse.