What Causes Tinnitus?
The causes of Tinnitus can include:
- exposure to loud noise
- a side effect of medication
- ear or head injuries
- diseases of the ear
- ear infections
- emotional stress
Tinnitus often occurs alongside some damage to hearing, for instance after an acute loss of hearing.
What does tinnitus sound like?
What Does Tinnitus Sound Like? | The Tinnitus & Hearing Clinic
Watch Our Causes of Tinnitus Video
Why Doesn't The Tinnitus Sound Go Away?
When people have tinnitus long-term, one or more of the causes in the list above, at some point, led to an auditory malfunction.
The brain tries to compensate for this malfunction and is the start of a vicious cycle.
The auditory cortex is the part of the brain that is responsible for hearing. Every sound perceived by the ear is transmitted to and processed by the auditory cortex.
The nerve cell assemblies in a specific area of the auditory cortex are ‘tuned’ to a certain frequency, similar to the arrangement of keys on a piano.
No matter what triggers may be responsible for the tinnitus – noise, medication, stress – they all lead to an interruption of the signal transmission from the ear to the auditory cortex.
This means that some of your nerve cell assemblies no longer receive any signals. To stay with the piano image: some of the piano’s keys no longer work and cannot be struck by the pianist. The ‘ear’ doesn’t hear the sound anymore.
However, these nerve cell assemblies are used to having sounds reach them. They react to the lack of stimulus (sounds) not by being ‘silent’.
Instead the nerve cells begin to ‘chatter’ spontaneously and become synchronously attuned to one another.
Once they have become hyperactive and synchronous in this way, the nerve cells simulate a tone that the brain ‘hears’ – the tinnitus tone.
Coming back to the piano; the broken keys have created their own permanent tone even without the keys being struck by the pianist.
Over time, this pattern strengthens and the tinnitus becomes permanently anchored – the brain has learnt a phantom sound.
What Does Tinnitus Sound Like?
The Causes of Tinnitus
Our video explains the neurological causes of tonal tinnitus.