New Tinnitus Model by Patrick Kraus & Holger Schulze to Explain Origin of Tinnitus

An article in the Belgian magazine EOS Wetenschap mentions a model by neuroscientists Patrick Kraus & Holger Schulze that possibly describes the origin of tinnitus. In the article, it is mentioned that tinnitus is the side effect of an internal mechanism to improve hearing after noise trauma. Here's further explanation in the following quotes (that I've roughly translated):

''Ringing in the ears is a side effect of a mechanism [of the brain] that aims to improve hearing after hearing damage (...) It works like this. If a sound is too weak to hear it, our auditory system adds "noise" to it so that you can still hear the sound. That noise comes from neurons/nerve cells from the somatosensory system. These nerve cells process what you feel, such as a touch, the stretching of muscles and the positioning of joints. They are physically connected to the cochlea''

''Normally, the somatosensory nerve pathways - and thus the noise - in the cochlea are suppressed. But with hearing damage, no sound penetrates from the outside at a certain pitch. As a result, the inhibition on that frequency disappears completely. Result: you hear a beep''

(...)

''If Kraus and Schulze's model is correct, external noise could replace the inner noise and thus prevent tinnitus. This seems to work in laboratory animals. Researchers exposed mice to noise. Then they heard acoustic noise for seven days that corresponded to normal living room noises. Only one out of eight animals developed tinnitus. In the control group, which did not hear any noise, there was half the chance to have tinnitus. Research with human patients is currently underway.''

Link: https://www.eoswetenschap.eu/psyche-brein/dit-de-oorzaak-van-oorsuizen

 

Great, they discovered residual inhibition.
Stick to making chocolate @Belgium.

 

Isn't this what hearing aids do?

 

Ey @dan, well, at least the Belgians know that chocolate taste better with waffles than maple syrup

Main point of the story is that tinnitus is the outcome of the brain trying to improve hearing after hearing damage.

But if you're focusing on residual inhibition, well imo that's a coping mechanism after you have tinnitus. In the article, the researchers are talking about playing normal living room sounds (not specific frequency sounds or white noise, etc.) continuously. for a couple of days in the background as a way to prevent tinnitus from happening in the first place.

 

Hearing aids have maskers to help camouflage tinnitus. But normally people wear it if they already have considerable hearing loss and tinnitus. So far as I know, most people who wear hearing aids do not use it to prevent getting tinnitus.

 

Very interesting finding! Full text is only in Dutch but I have found some recent pre-print of the same author in English https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2020/03/29/2020.03.27.011163.full.pdf "The Stochastic Resonance model of auditory perception: A unified explanation of tinnitus development, Zwicker tone illusion, and residual inhibition".
If I understand correctly this model is much different from @Will Sedley 's model where Tinnitus originates only(?) from prediction error caused by signal precision loss e.g. after noise trauma and Sedley's model does not take into account extra somatosensory signals getting into auditory path. If this is true suppressing somatosensory signal noise in auditory path would be equivalent to suppressing tinnitus.
I wonder if we can try to invite two gentlemen (Kraus and Schulze) to our forum and do some QA. @Hazel what do you think?
What I would like to know is (1) how their model can be validated / confirmed in experimental fashion? (2) if it is confirmed what kind of treatments could be arise from this model, e.g. ablation or sedation of DCN's somatosensory nerve connections?

 

Does a nagging wife count as a normal living room sound?

 

Interesting insight @dan. You could put the question forward to one of the researchers if they're using it as a variable in their current trial: holger.schulze@uk-erlangen.de

 

Yes, it’s not residual inhibition but the stochastic resonance effect. @Danad shared on it before.

 

@Adaś good point about how different their model is from Sedley's model. This shows how hard it is to pin point the cause of our disorder, and somewhere I find that disheartening, because it makes it so elusive in finding a way towards a cure.

I didn't know that. Thanks for giving a name to this phenomenon @sssing ! So for other readers of this forum, it means this:

Stochastic resonance (SR) is a phenomenon where a signal that is normally too weak to be detected by a sensor, can be boosted by adding white noise to the signal, which contains a wide spectrum of frequencies. (Wiki)

 

Whatever it is, it's a dead end, just churning water.
Hair cell regeneration and Thanos' pill is our last hope for treatment, seriously.

 

This is not even remotely about residual inhibition...

 

I know. It's just like whatever eh...

 

Thanks Christiaan.

It's interesting. I remember another study from years ago stating listening to white noise after acoustic trauma could inhibit tinnitus from developing because the brain's auditory pathways are occupied and the cortical reorganisation can't take place. Now we know from more recent studies white noise can be bad for the brain, but maybe in this situation it could have its benefits.