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The article is long (but interesting!) and a lot of it isn't about the particular scientific discovery in the headline. Here's the part that describes the disc
by nerdponx 2y ago
The article is long (but interesting!) and a lot of it isn't about the particular scientific discovery in the headline.
Here's the part that describes the discovery:
> The most mind-blowing moment, not only for De La Mata but the scientists too, came when they managed to actually record the sounds that she heard in her ears – which now appear as ‘Left Ear’ and ‘Right Ear’ which begin sides A and B on the album – and in doing so opened up questions about the nature of tinnitus itself. “The NHS definition is that it’s a phantom sound that your brain is creating, that it isn’t something ‘real’, so you should try to ignore it.” By having De La Mata place her ear into an anechoic chamber, with an ultra-sensitive microphone perched in her ear canal, they were able to provide significant evidence to the contrary. “After the first recording of it, it was ‘There’s no way, this isn’t possible.’” They tried again with her breath held, and again with her tensing her ears, and again with other members of staff, but each time it became apparent that yes, the noises De La Mata hears are seemingly something physical. More intriguingly still, the two women whose ears were recorded, De La Mata and Lana Norris – the musicologist whose voice appears on the album’s ‘PINK Noise’, and who is also a choral director – were the only two people whose ears were found to produce spontaneous otoacoustic emissions. “It’s something to do with hormone difference, but they don’t really know why,” De La Mata says. Present in most children but believed to fade over time, they’re also found far more in musicians than in other adults, for reasons yet unknown. It all raises a lot of questions. “What I have is tinnitus by the definition we have now, but maybe that’s not correct. Maybe it’s something else,” De La Mata wonders aloud.
Is there an academic followup to this? I would imagine that this is a pretty major anatomical/medical discovery and that the discoverers would want to write a paper about it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tempestn 2y agoThat's fascinating. So I guess the sound must be produced by something in the body; blood flow would be my guess. And then the structure of the ear is maybe amplifying it?
- geuis 2y agoThanks for summarizing that. I have mild tinnitus that comes and goes so I wanted to get the important info. Instead the article goes on and on like a lifestyle article.
- LiquidHelium 2y agoFrom some quick reading I don't think this is a new discovery, there is even a name for it "objective tinnitus". Here's a case study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4922963/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4922963/
- wrs 2y agoWhat I would like to understand is the logic that says in some cases we see a physical noise being created by the ear, yet we conclude this is a tiny minority of cases, with all the rest being some issue with neural processing. As opposed to thinking we just don’t have a sensitive enough measurement in those other cases. I can’t find this logic in a casual search. References anyone?
- rufus_foreman 2y agoI've had tinnitus for many decades, when I first went to a doctor for it around 30 years ago he told me that in some cases it was an actual sound that other people could hear. He checked and he couldn't hear mine. Although I did consider the possibility that he was just putting me on.
- amluto 2y agoAnd more generally: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otoacoustic_emission https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otoacoustic_emission
- dang 2y agoThe submitted title was "First recording of tinnitus raises new questions". We've changed it to what the article says now. (edit: well, I added the bit about tinnitus, in a concession to the already existing thread. If someone has a better title suggestion, preferably using representative language from the article, we can change it again.) "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html