Where does tinnitus arise?
There are many hints that in most cases tinnitus does actually begin in the inner ear, i.e. has a cochlear cause. Indeed, with the excess of sound impressions that reach our ear every minute, there must be some occasional mal-information, which is carried via the auditory pathway to the brain and triggers a loop as above. If the mal-information was only brief, this loop should quickly terminate or-as we say – run dead. If some mal-information with a high level of alertness perpetuates, it will constantly re- trigger the sensorineural loop as above, until by way of internal feed back mechanisms, it will become a phenomenon solely located within the brain. We speak of a centralized sound. In this context it may be of interest that, after a while, all of us without exception will experience tinnitus when locked up in a sound-tight chamber. We may thus conclude that tinnitus is a actually the manifestation of some from of basic activity of our auditory system, which we normally dont notice
