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My ENT recommended white noise long term especially for sleeping which I’ve been using for months. Based on everything I’ve googled the last few months this is

by mdmglr 4y ago

My ENT recommended white noise long term especially for sleeping which I’ve been using for months. Based on everything I’ve googled the last few months this is the first time I’m reading the claim that “ breakdown of the ears’ and/or brain’s noise filtering and suppression mechanisms.” so I’m a little skeptical in what you are saying. My understanding is that tinnitus is the damage to the hairs in the cochlea. Which causes the audio processing nerves to have issues. Not anything to do with noise filtering. However as I’ve been suffering from tinnitus I don’t want to discount anything you are saying. Do you manually adjust volume or are you doing something automated? How can I do the same?

fwlr 4y ago
I’m not a doctor and your ENT is, you should listen to them and not me. I shouldn’t have said “Prevailing theory”, that gives the wrong impression. Makes it seem like “this is what doctors think” when it’s actually just what I think. I’ll edit that. I did have a semi-automated method for causing those noise jumps, I’ll see if I can find it for you. Well, I looked, and can’t find it. It’s on a lost machine. One should always keep backups, but one rarely does. I do recall the basic structure of my solution, it was a kludge job with an AppleScript that set system volume to a random amount and a shell script that slept a random number of seconds, ran the AppleScript, and ran itself again. I vaguely recall it was hard to find programmatic system-wide equalizer settings but that may be different now, and it may be different in Linux/Windows too. It was not a comfortable experience, it definitely made listening to music into an exercise like running on a treadmill, but subjectively it was very helpful. I do recall getting the idea for this from reading medical literature on hyperacusis, so theoretically there might be some scientific support for it, but I have no citations to give.
- mdmglr 4y ago
  Sounds good. I can write a script to do that. I’ll give this I try. Appreciate it. Might try to see if eqMac has AppleScript support. Hang in there. Hopefully one day hearing damage can be cured.
  - fwlr 4y ago
    Thanks. It doesn’t bother me as much as my comments make it seem it does, I learned to live with it long ago. But there are people who are bothered by their tinnitus and they suffer immensely, and it’s not very empathetic to say “learn to live with it, I did”, so I don’t.
DHPersonal 4y ago
I've only heard or read various sources referencing the nerve / hair damage that you mention, with the audible noise being sometimes associated with the auditory system increasing its sensitivity in those frequencies in an effort to hear something from the damaged sensors.
- mdmglr 4y ago
  Makes sense.

by mdmglr 4y ago

fwlr 4y ago

I’m not a doctor and your ENT is, you should listen to them and not me. I shouldn’t have said “Prevailing theory”, that gives the wrong impression. Makes it seem like “this is what doctors think” when it’s actually just what I think. I’ll edit that. I did have a semi-automated method for causing those noise jumps, I’ll see if I can find it for you. Well, I looked, and can’t find it. It’s on a lost machine. One should always keep backups, but one rarely does. I do recall the basic structure of my solution, it was a kludge job with an AppleScript that set system volume to a random amount and a shell script that slept a random number of seconds, ran the AppleScript, and ran itself again. I vaguely recall it was hard to find programmatic system-wide equalizer settings but that may be different now, and it may be different in Linux/Windows too. It was not a comfortable experience, it definitely made listening to music into an exercise like running on a treadmill, but subjectively it was very helpful. I do recall getting the idea for this from reading medical literature on hyperacusis, so theoretically there might be some scientific support for it, but I have no citations to give.

mdmglr 4y ago
Sounds good. I can write a script to do that. I’ll give this I try. Appreciate it. Might try to see if eqMac has AppleScript support. Hang in there. Hopefully one day hearing damage can be cured.
- fwlr 4y ago
  Thanks. It doesn’t bother me as much as my comments make it seem it does, I learned to live with it long ago. But there are people who are bothered by their tinnitus and they suffer immensely, and it’s not very empathetic to say “learn to live with it, I did”, so I don’t.

DHPersonal 4y ago

I've only heard or read various sources referencing the nerve / hair damage that you mention, with the audible noise being sometimes associated with the auditory system increasing its sensitivity in those frequencies in an effort to hear something from the damaged sensors.

mdmglr 4y ago
Makes sense.