Art 19 ↔ Art 12 — Content exemplifies free expression and information dissemination (Article 19) while operating within platform infrastructure that systematically collects user behavior data for targeting and tracking (Article 12 privacy), creating tension between editorial openness and structural surveillance.

mynameisash 2026-03-07 14:46 UTC link

I'll save you about 30 ad views:

> The Oxford researchers proposed that the large spontaneous waves of brain activity that occur during deep sleep, or non-rapid eye movement sleep (non-REM), might suppress the brain activity that leads to tinnitus.

epolanski 2026-03-07 14:51 UTC link

I've got tinnitus, 38 male.

Got it randomly one day this summer.

It's impossible to describe how depressing it is to hear a sound non stop in your ears, night and day, wherever I go or whatever I do, it just never stops.

The brain started filtering it out a bit after months, but it's always there and you're often reminded of it when you're in a slightly more silent environment.

There are days where it becomes especially loud and falling asleep you'd just like to cry or something.

Don't wish it on anybody.

getnormality 2026-03-07 14:55 UTC link

> researchers found that ferrets that developed more severe tinnitus also showed disrupted sleep.

Hold up. How do we know when ferrets have tinnitus???

m3kw9 2026-03-07 15:04 UTC link

And sleep is related to air way/jaw/tongue/bite issues which causes mouth breathing and sleep apenia. Get it checked out by your dentist

ericpp 2026-03-07 16:02 UTC link

I first got it in 2015 after playing Fallout 4 almost nonstop for the entire weekend. The game ran poorly and the low stuttery fps caused a massive migraine in my head. I took Tylenol and went to sleep and woke up with it ringing in one of my ears which eventually moved to both. The doctors were pretty useless and said they couldn't see anything wrong and to just live with it.

My brain eventually figured out how to tune it out and now it associates the sound with silence.

Now I've developed it again after feeling depressed and blasting music in my car. The new version crackles and alternates tones in my left ear. I have a doctors appointment coming up to hopefully figure it out.

There is a new expensive treatment for it called Lenore which works by playing sounds and stimulating your tongue at the same time. Those pathways are located close together in the brain and by stimulating both at the same time, it's supposed to train it to filter out the noise.

rheng 2026-03-07 16:11 UTC link

I also have been suffering from tinnitus a little over a year now. It definitely has impacted my sleep, especially my mornings. It's the first thing I think about when I wake up.

I've been following the work of Auricle Inc., a company commercializing decades of neuroscience research out of Dr. Susan Shore's lab at the University of Michigan. (Full disclosure: I have spoken to their CEO about potentially helping with their funding, although my primary concern is getting their product to the public).

Instead of just masking the sound, their device targets the root cause using bimodal neuromodulation. It pairs specific audio tones with mild electrical pulses to the jaw/neck to desynchronize hyperactive neurons in the dorsal cochlear nucleus.

Here are the two papers that cover the underlying science, and go over the efficacy:

The foundational mechanism and Phase 1 trial showing how it induces long-term depression (LTD) in the brain circuitry: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.aal3175

The Phase 2 double-blind, randomized clinical trial results showing significant reductions in tinnitus loudness and burden: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

altairprime 2026-03-07 16:33 UTC link

I’ve been using my tinnitus to evaluate whether I got enough sleep or when I’ve become tired for years, so it’s nice to randomly trip over validation here that the link is universal to and not just a hyperlocal mutation. Thanks for posting this.

I suppose I wouldn’t have noticed this if I was trying to tune out tinnitus, but I’m just used to it? Not like anything is every quiet (my hearing is hyperactive), but, like, the tone and volume of it right now is “insufficient sleep but circadian forced us awake” so I need to be particularly measured and chill if I drive while it’s this loud.

RockstarSprain 2026-03-07 16:48 UTC link

Personal anecdote: removing a lower wisdom tooth that was close to the jaw nerve nearly cured my tinnitus back in the day.

The surgeon dentist was really surprised by this and could not evoke any similar cases in their practice before mine.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 2026-03-07 16:49 UTC link

As somebody with tinnitus, forgive me, this seemed instinctively obvious. A very bad night of sleep raises the volume of the tinnitus substantially. Stress does the same.

dahart 2026-03-07 17:37 UTC link

This sometimes makes my tinnitus go away temporarily: https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/whiteBurstsNoiseGenerator....

And this I can sometimes use to pinpoint my tinnitus tone(s): https://generalfuzz.net/acrn/

jdenning 2026-03-07 17:53 UTC link

For people suffering from tinnitus, here is a technique that greatly helped me:

1. Place your hands over your ears such that your fingers are on the back of your skull - thumbs should be on your neck and middle fingers at the base of your skull.

2. Tap your middle fingers on the base of your skull repeatedly for ~30 seconds

It apparently doesn’t work for everyone, and it’s not permanent, but for me it greatly reduces the “volume” or stops it entirely.

I have no idea what the explanation is, but it’s free, safe, and you can try it right now.

Hope that helps! Tinnitus sucks.

Marsymars 2026-03-07 18:45 UTC link

I have, I think, probably the most benign tinnitus I could imagine.

I randomly get something in my head that sounds pretty close to coil whine, but definitely isn't coil whine — I've had it when I'm in the depths of the wilderness with no electronics.

It typically lasts less than 20s and I can go months between occurrences.

kiririn 2026-03-07 18:49 UTC link

I solved mine by chronically exposing myself to very low noise during sleep - wearing good earplugs in an already silent room. To the point where you can hear your eyeballs move etc. I guess this may be where the link to good sleep comes from, which implies a quiet sleeping environment

ctmnt 2026-03-07 18:57 UTC link

The opening sentence “Those who have never endured the relentless ringing of tinnitus can only dream of the torment” does not mean what they think it means. Unless this is a very niche kink.

nowittyusername 2026-03-07 19:52 UTC link

Got mine after my first Acid trip (still don't know if it was real acid). Its not debilitating for me, just annoying. So yeah, be careful out there folks. The Acid trip was very cerebral though and I consider it to be an important experience in my life so I am kind of on the fence that it might have been worth the trade off....

gbraad 2026-03-07 19:57 UTC link

I thought it was raining on our trip to venice: "you hear that dear, quite nasty rain". She looked at me puzzled, but hadn't noticed what I really heard. The next day was obvious... This now 15+ years ago. Some days it is bad, some days I hardly notice. It does not affect me that much: still hear near pitch perfect (work on music stuff as hobby), mostly a consistent hiss which can get annoying sometimes as it can distracts, mostly can ignore it. Some people can't, maybe lucky? Edit: Local doctor just once told me:just listen to music to drown it out, don't over do.... Keep enjoying it. never seeked further help.

stacktraceyo 2026-03-08 06:32 UTC link

AirPod pros noise cancellation gave me my tinnitus. Just as a warning to others be careful. There’s an apple support page with lots of people complaining about the same thing.

tsoukase 2026-03-08 07:41 UTC link

Tinnitus might be the simplest debilitating disease. It's sad that no therapy, even alleviating, is available.

I always thought that tinnitus is caused by a "rusted" acoustic nerve wire (here it's coexistence with hearing loss) no central mechanism is evolved. Linking non-REM sleep phase to tinnitus production is unexpected.

Salmoneo 2026-03-08 14:25 UTC link

I'm 35. I've got tinnitus since I was 9/10 years old. The insurgence of my tinnitus is interesting: I got it after sleeping an entire night with a television static after watching a VHS. Another interesting aspect is that the aforementioned insurgence happened in 2 phases: I went asleep watching a VHS and the subsequent static sound made me hear a ringing sound for a while (some days IIRC) then disappeared; a week after that I went asleep again in the same way (vhs, static etc) and from that moment onward I always got a ringing. It sounds like when you turn on a ctr tv. Initially I was kind of alarmed. No one believed me and I found the existence of the condition after many years on tv or internet. My brain filter the sound most of the time so I live with the condition.

cyager81 2026-03-08 22:28 UTC link

I’ve had it for almost 6 years. I’m fairly certain it can be solved by a simple laser to the blood vessels in my ear, but doctors refuse to even try it. My tinnitus started as hearing my heartbeat for over a year before it turned into a screeching noise. It makes complete sense to me that blood vessels in the ear are the primary cause, considering how many ailments can cause new blood vessel growth… why has nobody even considered this as a cause to tinnitus? If i could clearly hear my own pulse/heartbeat, then maybe just maybe it’s because a blood vessel was forming extremely close to the inner ear… but nobody will help me, because American doctors are only concerned about their paychecks than they actually care about helping anyone. All of that blood rushing through my ear, shaking the inner ear bones, etc, has destroyed about 80% of my hearing in my right ear… i really wish there was a doctor out there that actually cared enough to help me try to end it… it’s game over if it ever spreads to my other ear too and nobody is still willing to help me…because i will go insane if this begins permanent surround sound with both ears screeching inside my head.

bookofjoe 2026-03-07 14:48 UTC link

I'll do even better — here's the original 2022 paper:

https://academic.oup.com/braincomms/article/4/3/fcac089/6563...

the_mitsuhiko 2026-03-07 15:02 UTC link

This way: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4411996/

jarnagin 2026-03-07 15:14 UTC link

I got it about ten years ago and it drove me absolutely insane for a few months until I just accepted that I would have it. Then a weird thing happened: my brain stopped paying attention to it. Now I mostly only hear it when I think to myself, “do I still have tinnitus?” and try to listen for it. It’s still there, I just don’t care anymore. I had no idea that even what you hear can be such a subjective experience until I went through this, but it makes sense. You do this all the time when you tune out ambient sounds and conversations to focus on something.

bookofjoe 2026-03-07 15:16 UTC link

I thought you were exaggerating so I went back and counted: I stopped at 50 and I wasn't even CLOSE to reaching the end of the page!!!

nozzlegear 2026-03-07 15:21 UTC link

I've had tinnitus for as long as I can remember, so I've never had any negative feelings associated with it. As a kid I just thought it was natural that everyone's ears would ring all the time and would get louder when it was quiet. My ears are ringing right now as I write this.

Then I developed pulsatile tinnitus in my early 30s, which means I can hear my heartbeat in my (right) ear at all hours of the day as well. When I tell people about it, I like to describe it like the heartbeat from Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart.

Developing pulsatile tinnitus really affected my mental health for a while, despite living my whole life with a constant buzzing and ringing in my ears. I couldn't get over the fact that there was now this loud whooshing sound in my right ear, 60+ times per second, and my doctors couldn't even tell me why after several MRIs. I thought I was going crazy, or that I'd developed some kind of brain tumor invisible to scans.

I don't have any great advice except to say that eventually (maybe six months to a year) my brain just adapted to the sound and I hardly ever think of it anymore. It's as much a part of my life as the buzzing and ringing I've had since I was a kid. It can be annoying when I'm trying to listen intently for something (my wife is a birder and it's hard to hear things she points out), but it thankfully doesn't affect my mental health anymore.

bookofjoe 2026-03-07 15:37 UTC link

I doubt most dentists know more about sleep apnea than you do. Look elsewhere.

BOSIG 2026-03-07 15:39 UTC link

I got a high-pitch ringing tinnitus when I was about 18-20. I went from being a person that falls asleep in <5 min to needing at least 1h + needing a background radio/white noise/stream to fall asleep. I sympathize and recognize everything that you reflect on here. I felt kind of "depressed" the first year.

But no matter how cliché it sounds, it does get better with time. The brain does get better and better with filtering it. I also discovered that my tinnitus gets worse with caffeine, stress and lack of sleep. In periods when I live a overall "healthy" lifestyle in respect to sleep, stress, food, working out etc. I forget that I have tinnitus. When I sleep to little and/or when I'm stressed, it comes back full force. I have totally cut out caffeine, which also happened to help with my migraine.

Now ~15 years later I'm in my early thirties and I rarely think about it tbh. However, after a bad cold about 5 years ago I got a secondary tinnitus which is a low-frequency humming. This set me back and cased me some sleepless nights but I have adapted to this as well.

The thing I miss the most is the concept of "total silence". I do envy my fiancé sometimes if we're out in the woods or whatever and I know that she can just relax while "hearing nothing".

Let time do its work and experiment with your body/health to find what makes it lessen. Chances are that de-stressing, sleeping well and eating and working out does make it better.

newt_slowly 2026-03-07 16:51 UTC link

My dad had tinnitus and it bothered him relentlessly. He was constantly following potential new treatments, talking to doctors about it, etc.

I have it too. I've taken the approach of truly accepting it: "I will hear these sounds the rest of my life, and I'm truly okay with that". As a result it doesn't give me anxiety or bother me, and I find it helps it fade into the background. The more you focus on it (and let it bother you) the more it stays in the foreground.

I know the advice of "just learn to be okay with it" is easy to communicate but very hard to actually do. I found mindfulness meditation helped me learn to accept things without judgement, including the presence of my tinnitus.

amelius 2026-03-07 17:13 UTC link

So perhaps the connection is sleep -> stress -> tinnitus?

Kinrany 2026-03-07 18:04 UTC link

uBlock Origin reduces it to an almost reasonable number of three embeds plus the "trending" section. But the cookies consent modal is also disgusting

bigstrat2003 2026-03-07 18:52 UTC link

> The doctors were pretty useless and said they couldn't see anything wrong and to just live with it.

Unfortunately that is the truth of it. Sometimes tinnitus can be traced to other parts of the body, but more often it seems to be caused by the brain acting up. And we just don't have enough knowledge about the brain to fix things like that, so all you can do is try to habituate.

ElCapitanMarkla 2026-03-07 18:54 UTC link

Not sure about stress, but definitely have the same exp re sleep. If I’m tired the ringing is very noticeable, when I wake up early after a late night it can be deafening. But besides from noticing it being “louder” it seems to go away, or I just ignore it.

YZF 2026-03-07 19:37 UTC link

I also have good experience with wearing ear protection in a quiet room. But I haven't been disciplined enough about it. My probably wrong rationale is that part of the issue is hearing loss and reducing the volume retrains your brain to be able to process smaller signals.

anonym00se1 2026-03-07 19:46 UTC link

Sorry to hear this. I similarly woke up one day with bi-lateral tinnitus at about an 8/10 in loudness. Thought I was going to lose my mind.

After about 9 days one morning the right ear completely resolved and the left ear was at about a 5/10.

Very, very, very long story short, I did a ton of digging and experimenting and realized it was related to a neck injury (a lot of people with whiplash have short-long term tinnitus). Over a year of physical therapy later, the tinnitus in the left ear is usually gone and only flares up if I lift weights with poor form.

If you've had a neck/shoulder injury in the past 1-2 years, it's something I'd look into.

jryb 2026-03-07 20:22 UTC link

It’s been well known for as long time, the news here is the specific biological mechanism, which may open up new areas of research.

chopete3 2026-03-07 20:45 UTC link

Thats what I thought when I first read it. I don't this is something that people look forward to in dreams. Or possible to imagine in dreams.

There are limits to dreams.

wpollock 2026-03-07 20:48 UTC link

If they're Greek ferrets, apparently they become constipated. :-)

thrance 2026-03-07 21:42 UTC link

Also, in the fleeting moments between waking and full consciousness, I can hear all sounds coming back to me (ringing included), exactly as if they had been turned off by my brain during sleep and are now being turned on again.

xtracto 2026-03-07 21:58 UTC link

Dr Shore device has been decades in development. It's been all the rage in r/tinnitus , r/tinnitusresearch and T. Facebook groups. Still according to people that have tried it, it's no silver bullet.

I've had tinnitus for 25+ years and followed a lot of science. At some point some Brasil researchers found a drug that reduced tinnitus volume as a secondary effect. There wrote papers about it, but unfortunately, nothing came of it.

tim333 2026-03-07 23:56 UTC link

It's interesting that worked. It reminds me of Scott Adams' story where he lost his voice due to spasming and got it back through surgery that cut one of the nerves involved.

(https://www.brainandlife.org/articles/spasmodic-dysphonia-re...)

tim333 2026-03-07 23:59 UTC link

Tom Blomfield, the Monzo guy / YC partner fixed his with that

https://x.com/t_blom/status/1810459463725588861

marand23 2026-03-08 09:39 UTC link

Thanks for supporting tinitus research. It gives me some hope that there will be a treatment someday.

tim333 2026-03-08 13:46 UTC link

It's interesting. I guess the algorithm moves the pod diaphragm to try to oppose external noise but must push the ear drum out of it's design range.

I have tinnitus. My theory of how it arises is the bit of the ear that converts spatial movement to electrical signals - some hairs tied to an ion channel basically - gets moved too far and breaks the thing in such a way that the channel jams open.

The noise pro stuff may be worse than regular loud noises as the ear recognises loud noises and tries to protect itself but may not do that with the noise cancellation movements.

(diagram of what the gear looks like https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/3-s2.0-B97801237494750...)

firemelt 2026-03-08 15:56 UTC link

so its like lenire machine?

firemelt 2026-03-08 15:57 UTC link

I think I should remove my wisdom tooth too

yesitcan 2026-03-08 18:10 UTC link

It’s spelled Lenire.

erentz 2026-03-12 08:19 UTC link

Hearing your heart beat like this can be a sign of an arteriovenous fistula in the brain.

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