On Mon, 6 Oct 2003 01:13:08 +0100, "Ben Pope" <[email protected]>
wrote:

>Jim Frohoff wrote:

>> - white noise generation (2 or 3 seperate, tuneable white-noise
>> generators would be desired. One way to deal with severe tinnitus is to
>> "mask" the noise with white noise of matching frequencies,
>
>That wouldn't work, since white noise is random. Hmm, or would your brain
>just learn to ignore that frequency band? If it does, then why can it not
>ignore the tinnitus? My undrstanding of the ear and related systems falls
>down here :-)

This is one of those areas where the effectiveness of the treatment
depends a lot on the individual, but this sort of thing has been used
with some success on a lot of folks. It doesn't work for everybody,
and some people do self-mask tinnitus without any training (I fall in
that category, fortunately).

Apparently the noise helps to decorrelate the tinnitus in the brain,
which for some people otherwise locks to it like a PLL and amplifies
it (kinda like the "don't think of a purple elephant" trick). Once
the brain gets the hint that the tinnitus can be ignored (after it's
masked with noise for a while), it doesn't have as much trouble doing
it. At least that's my simplified take on what is most likely a very
complex neural processing problem in our wetware. There are some
well-known Tinnitus researchers who claim to know relative
sensitivities, etc., well enough to know exactly how much noise to
apply, etc. It's pretty interesting stuff, but the need is real and
this sort of treatment with level-controlled noise in the frequency
region of interest seems to work for a lot of people.


Eric Jacobsen
Minister of Algorithms, Intel Corp.
My opinions may not be Intel's opinions.
http://www.ericjacobsen.org