Hacking the Brain to Treat Tinnitus

It could be referred to as "ringing in the ears." You could also refer to it as "a pain in the butt" if you have it. When a doctor diagnoses tinnitus, they typically follow up with, "And I'm afraid there's not much I can do about it." There aren't many obvious treatment options because you're essentially hearing an undead sound. Unless we could fool your mind into believing that the sound is real? No, it seems to work, and millions of people may be able to find relief from that. This is the method.

When nothing outside the body is producing sound waves that travel to the ear, ringing, roaring, or buzzing sounds, among other seemingly phantom sensations, are known as tinnitus. It's more of a collection of symptoms than a specific illness, and it's not always obvious what causes it in a given patient. It is estimated that at least 10% of people worldwide suffer from tinnitus, and for some, the condition can have a significant negative impact on quality of life. It frequently coexists with hearing loss and could even contribute to its advancement, though this varies from person to person.

A number of things can contribute, including excessive earwax, noise exposure at work, head or neck trauma, and occupational exposure. Some people may also have a genetic predisposition that plays a role in their symptoms. Although the causes are becoming more clear to us, effective treatments have proven difficult to find. Patients with these symptoms have occasionally been written off by doctors, who have also suggested that the patient is delusional. Which, while true in a technical sense, still paints you as a nasty person. Even those providers who do acknowledge the seriousness of tinnitus have had few options available. They consist of sound therapies mixed with psychotherapy.

Psychotherapy was not intended to lessen the actual noises; rather, it was intended to address the distress that some individuals with tinnitus symptoms feel. Furthermore, the sound therapies that a few physicians have suggested thus far are authorized for the treatment of other ailments rather than tinnitus. That is to say, not much has been developed to address the underlying cause of the symptoms. As a result, those who have tinnitus have largely been left to cope with the occasionally crippling effects on memory, focus, and sleep, which can either cause or exacerbate anxiety or depression. Even though tinnitus has been called a particularly difficult set of symptoms to diagnose, our knowledge of it has grown.

And it seems that manipulating people's brains with their senses in addition to their hearing may hold the key to treatment. Over the last ten years or so, medical professionals and researchers have observed that some patients are able to adjust the intensity of their tinnitus by moving or applying pressure to their face, neck, head, or other non-hearing related parts. These individuals suffer from somatic or somatosensory tinnitus. Although the exact mechanism is still unknown, it essentially seems as though people are able to hear with an additional sense. Considering that we usually think of each of our senses as distinct, that sounds a little surreal.

For example, sight and touch each have unique mechanisms for sending information from their various sensory organs to the brain. However, our senses are more interconnected than that. It functions more like an intricate network that combines all the various types of information that humans are capable of perceiving and transmits it to our brains. Recognizing that patients could occasionally alleviate their symptoms by cutting their own sensory fibers, scientists began investigating the possibility as a path toward a deeper comprehension of tinnitus. In order to cause tinnitus, animals—including guinea pigs—were the subject of several studies conducted in the 2010s. The strength and connection between the cells in the brain stem appear to be altered by whatever causes tinnitus, according to their findings.

In the end, researchers discovered that the dorsal cochlear nucleus, or DCN, is a layered structure in the brain stem where a lot of this activity occurs. This region in mammals is where sound waves enter the ear for the first time. in addition to inputs from touch and additional body experiences in the head and neck. Although there is still much for scientists to learn about this structure, they are aware that the DCN does more than just receive and transmit these inputs. It is essential for processing them as well.

These investigations on animals demonstrated that a specific event was taking place in the fusiform cell circuit, a region of the DCN. One of the last areas in the DCN to process inputs before sending them on their way to be perceived is this cluster of neurons. The fusiform cells had heightened activity and neural connections in tinnitus-affected animals. which appears to be the phantom noise's origin. All of this was combined by University of Michigan researchers in a double-blind, 99 patients with somatic tinnitus participated in a randomized clinical trial.

In June 2023, they released their findings in the journal JAMA Network Open. They proposed that the extra activity in the fusiform cell circuit could be reduced by timing the application of touch and sound. This therapy would surpass earlier approaches by genuinely reducing the acoustic stimulation perceived by tinnitus sufferers. For thirty minutes at a time, trial participants wore a particular kind of headset device that used electrodes applied to the head or neck to produce a combination of sounds and vibrations.

While everyone in the study had the opportunity to switch places and spend some time in the treatment group, those in the control group only heard noises. Both the volume of the sounds and the discomfort brought on by the symptoms were significantly reduced in more than half of the participants who received both vibrations and sounds. Essentially, the purpose of this treatment is to deliberately interfere with the area of the brain responsible for coordinating sensory signals.

Even though it doesn't seem like something you would typically want to do, more than half of the participants found success with it, so there was a good reason! Even better, the treatment effect remained even after participants stopped wearing the headgear on a daily basis. According to the University of Michigan team, their results are encouraging and offer hope to tinnitus sufferers. Now that the trial is over, the researchers want to get their device approved and onto the market as soon as possible.

Thus, it does demonstrate that something being entirely within a person's head, or specifically between their ears and brains, does not imply that it is not real. Hopefully, doctors will soon be able to use some literal positive energy to block these annoying noises, so patients won't have to settle for tinnitus. Try fooling yourself into thinking you're learning a whole new language by focusing on it for just ten minutes at a time if you're searching for additional brain-hacking techniques.