Hearing Through a Glass Darkly
For most of my life, I have had tinnitus. It shows up differently for different people. For me, it means I hear 6-8 audible pitches at any time, most of which are dissonant. Sometimes, I also hear a low-pitched rumbling like a motorcycle idling outside my head. Other times, the pitches swell for ten or twenty seconds, so loud they drown out any other sound. Although I've trained my brain to overlook them most of the time, they are most noticeable in silence. Tinnitus is not a real sound, even though it feels annoyingly real. It is actually a reaction of the brain to hearing loss. The brain is trying to replace the pitches it can no longer hear properly through the ears, but it does a pretty bad job. By listening to certain sounds, such as crickets chirping, tree frogs singing, or the sound of rain falling, or when hearing aids help to amplify the missing pitches, the brain says, "Oh, I don't have to work so hard to replace those pitches. I can back off a bit," and on