Weird Thing That Masks My Tinnitus

I think mine is really high pitch which is why it makes sense that it isn't loud but it can cut through most noise at my home.

What I have had a habit of doing was putting my finger at the part of the ear that kind of guards your ear canal? Pushing that in very slightly and it creates a whooshing sound and I don't hear the T.

Is that bad?

 

It is just your lucky case that your high pitch T is not very loud, but that is not a rule, high pitch T can be verrrrrry loud.

 

Sorry I meant that while it isn't loud it cuts across many masking sounds. I didn't mean that I thought high pitch can't be loud.

 

There are definitely no hard and fast rule, and I bet we can find outliers to almost anything. However, a good amount of research has come to the conclusion that in the significant majority of cases, tinnitus volume is within a few decibels of hearing threshold at any given frequency -- going all the way back to Fowler's work in the 1940s. Reed duplicated that result in the 60s, and I believe was the first person to find that trying to connect objective volume/pitch measurements to distress, doesn't tend to show the 1-to-1 correlation you might expect (that is, some people with relatively "loud" or "high pitched" tinnitus based on sound matching, report low distress, and vice-versa). Much more recent research has shown tissue density deficits in two different parts of the brain which appear to correlate separately with tinnitus volume and distress; it's tempting at this time to see that as a smoking gun, but probably that needs another 10-20 years to bake, since we're really in the infancy of a neurological model of how tinnitus operates.

Perceptual experiences are pretty weird and hard to pin down in the lab, in general. So much of what we "experience" is related to the way we construct our internal world. It remains to be seen, but my strong belief is that you can't really separate physiology from psychology, they are just two different models assessing the same things.

 

You are masking T with T

 

haha I guess that is true! the "whooshing" noise is much nicer than the high pitch ring though. I wish I had something that could do this for me at night.

 

I do not understand what you referring to when you say "the part of the ear that kind of guards your ear canal?" I am curious to do the experiment myself, but I do not understand how.

 

LOL it's hard to explain. It's like the flappy skin part right outside your ear canal? Unless my ears are different.

 

Do you mean the tragus?

 

Yeah, I think Aussit Lea is right and you refer to the tragus. Did the experiment. Does not work for me, so consider yourself lucky even for that short relief. I would take a whooshing over a ringing anytime.

 

Yes that's it

 

It actually makes my T worse.. in the sense that the T sounds amplifies. I usually do this only when to check on my T for spikes or whatever (sometimes the fridge make noises and I have to see if it is a new sound or just the fridge). Same thing with earplugs, it amplifies the T too. I have most "masking" by not having anything in my ears to be honest. Of course, I hear it very well in quiet rooms. So it doesn't really get masked by anything.

 

Same here.

 

How can they determine volume with any certainty when it is completely subjective?
My volume was measured multiple times for the clinical trials I'm in. The results were extremely consistent according to the audiologist, and they were way above just a few dB SL. By orders in magnitude actually.

 

In the imaging study that concluded different brain areas relate to distress and loudness, I believe the process was to use questionnaires to assess people's self-rated volume and distress levels, then do fMRI imaging. The result of that was that people with higher volume ratings showed a gray matter deficit in one place (thalamus, or thereabouts IIRC), and people with higher distress ratings showed a gray matter deficit in the right anterior insula. People with high ratings for both volume and distress showed both deficits. I will see if I can dig the study up, it was interesting, and might point to strategies of one kind or another that could reduce distress even if the tinnitus itself couldn't be reduced, who knows.

I have no idea how loud your tinnitus is; I was pretty careful above to point out that I think there's a huge spectrum of different experiences. All I said was that I believe that most people with tinnitus, including intrusive tinnitus, report a volume level that's within a few dB of their hearing at that frequency, because several studies have attempted to assess that, and came to that conclusion.