Thoughts on Tinnitus & Aging

I've been thinking about this more. Supposedly a lot of people age and never experience tinnitus. First, keep in mind I'm sticking to the wikipedia definition of presbycusis: "The hearing loss is most marked at higher frequencies. Hearing loss that accumulates with age but is caused by factors other than normal aging (nosocusis and sociocusis) is not presbycusis".

So is it possible the brain has some natural mechanism to ignore lost frequencies. So that makes me wonder if high frequency tinnitus will eventually be ignored as the high frequencies are ignored due to presbycusis. Is it possible Tinnitus is actually due to notches in our hearing? Our standard hearing tests are pretty coarse in my opinion and could easily skip over notches in hearing thresholds. Let's even go as far to say the gain of one hair cell is controlled by its adjacent neighbors, a relative gain. This would mean a compounding gain change because damaged cells would reduce the gain of their neighboring cells that hear well, while the gain is increased on the damaged cells due to their neighbors having good hearing still.

Lets say someone complains of 14kHz tinnitus in their ear and they are 30yrs old. First off, are there any people 60+ years old that complain of 14kHz tinnitus? Do they actually remember what 14kHz sounds like? How do you know what something sounds like if you can't hear it or can't remember what it sounds like? So sort of see where I'm going with this? So will the 30yr old always hear 14kHz his/her entire life? No one complains of 20kHz T and we lose those frequencies pretty early in life.

Is it possible when we age that as high frequencies are lost, the high frequency T could go away because the brain eventually loses interest in these frequencies because there is no longer ANY input at the frequencies and the central nervous system has turn down the gain to ignore? I suppose it is also possible all the lost frequencies just get replaced with a white noise (I suppose "blue" in this case) that the brain just naturally tunes out because there is nothing of interest there, rather than some tone?

Its far fetched, but maybe some people have experienced this first hand or can point me to something in the literature. I would like to keep this discussion to literature and first hand accounts if at all possible.

 

Its all still a mysterious aliment for those of us suffering from Tinnitus in all its forms...however some research reports support the view that the hearing nerve is a two way transmission line and that the brain can send signals back to the cochlear which then are manifested in "audible" noises and tones in our head/ears. Further more these brain signals are what prevents the critical nerve hairs from being at rest...i.e. not transmitting anything to the brain for processing.
.......... in early anlogue radio receivers, a function called automatic volume control (AVC) varied the sensitivity of the radio according to whether the incoming radio signal was weak or strong. It is now realised that the brain also in effect controls the sensitivity of the ear....so that the nerve cells can response to weak( tiny noises) signals while also being able to cope with say a huge truck rumbling past.