Tinnitus: The Source of The Sounds
One kind of tinnitus is called objective tinnitus which simply means that the noises in your head can be verified by an outside observer. Though – you may be surprised to discover where these sounds are coming from!
Many individuals who suffer with objective tinnitus are told that the many of the processes going on in their bodies are not silent ones. Not only are they not quiet, but it these very sounds that some people are hearing.
It might seem like this description should be a low-grade science fiction movie. But let’s just look at one sound we know emanates from our physical bodies – our heart beat.
Every time you visit your doctor he listens for your heart beat with his trusty stethoscope. Your heart beats making your blood “whooshes” through your arteries. But that’s not the only sound we hear, we have all heard our joints creak. And there can’t be many of us who haven’t heard our stomachs growl – to put it politely
Well, you get the idea no doubt. If you really gave it some thought, the body is probably far from silent.
And let’s face it, most of us unless we have an instrument which amplifies sounds, just don’t hear any of this. Why?
Well for one thing, many of these sounds are in areas where it’s really difficult to hear them. You might say these noises are in parts of the body that are “well insulated.” These activities are surrounded by muscles or other tissues and it is these tissues and muscles effectively capture and contain the vibrations that created the sounds we are hearing
But there are several other reasons why you don’t hear these noises. Your brain has the marvellous ability to simply tune them out.
That’s right! Your brain makes a judgement, so to speak deciding which sounds are relevant or irrelevant. It then makes the decision to filter out all the irrelevant sounds. So to you and I, it’s as if the noises never existed at all.
The brain makes another decision too, in ignores sounds produced with incessant regularity — like the beating of your heart. Otherwise you would be listening to that sound day in and day out.
Imagine not being able to sleep because your heart was beating too loud our that five course birthday meal decided to hang around for a bit longer and play you a tune.
For a number of reasons that we have covered elsewhere, we become aware of these sound so we would normally take no notice whatsoever. This would be particularly true if for instance someone became aware of the blood flowing through their ears all the veins in their neck.
Fortunately, as there is a defined physical cause and successful treatment of this type of tinnitus or hear noise is virtually certain.
