Re:Proteins That May Restore Damaged Sound-Detecting Cells i...
by alecst on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @10:48AM
(#20686356)
Yes -- although there are lots of folks with hearing loss who don't have tinnitus. There must be more to the story than just the ghost ringing that you're talking about. But I do think that the hypothesis you quote makes intuitive sense, at least as much as these hypercomplex things can be intuitive.
Re:Proteins That May Restore Damaged Sound-Detecting Cells i...
by tim333 on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @11:44AM
(#20686913)
As you say people can lose hearing without tinnitus. Having mild tinnitus myself and looked up how the hearing system works, I think the lead suspect must be the gizmo that converts the mechanical movement of sound waves into the ion level changes of neural impulses. It looks a bit like a tube that is opened or closed a little by movement of the hair attached to it, letting K+ ions through the hole or not. Damage to that could let ions go through when there is no actual movement of the hair.
It's kind of remarkable the things work as well as they do given the difference between 0db where you can just hear and 110db or so where it breaks is a 300,000x or so difference in amplitude.
(diagram of movement to ion flow gizmo close up https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Schematic-Diagram-of-Ste... zoomed out a bit https://jcs.biologists.org/content/joces/126/8/1721/F1.large...)
If tinnitus is a maladaptive neuroplasticity (your brain "needs" to hear something so if it can't because you're deaf at that frequency it'll invent things for you to hear instead) that makes sense to model as some stable limit cycle of a nonlinear system -- which is one of the leading hypotheses for tinnitus right now -- then it's not totally implausible that restoration of function would change your tinnitus percepts.
It's not clear that it'd help, but I'm pretty confident that if we can restore hair cell function, someone's going to try.