Few experts explain the ROOT CAUSE of TINNITUS like this! Makes total sense now. Dr. Jennifer Gans

The Brain and Phantom Sensations
The brain, again, is where the brain can make errors under times of stress.

And so, let's talk about our five senses. And there's more than five senses, but let's just talk about the main five. We have touch, taste, smell, vision, and hearing.

Okay. So, for those out there who've heard of phantom limb sensation—okay, God forbid I cut my hand off. Let's say my hand is gone, but my hand, while it's literally here, is actually right here because this is where all the sensations come to. This is where all the commands come from, and this is where all the memories of my hand are—are right in my brain.

So, God forbid I cut my hand off, and this is my ability to touch and feel the sense of touch.

And so, what happens?

The brain doesn't like to lose. The brain loves to fill things in.

And so, when it senses that it's not perceiving the sensation of touch, the brain says, “Wait a minute. It has to be here. It's always been here. I better search for it.”

So, the brain searches and searches and searches, and the brain gets really frustrated when it can't find what it's looking for. So, it searches harder.

And in that hard search, boom, it creates a sensation as if the hand were still there.

So, that's phantom limb sensation.

Phantom Smell and Taste
Now, let's go through the other four senses.

Sense of smell. There are reports that when somebody loses their sense of smell, many doctor's offices are filled with people that come in and say, “You know, I have no sense of smell, but I'm getting these phantom smells.”

You know, oftentimes they are unwanted smells.

But what ends up happening is, in the absence of that particular sense of smell, the brain says, “But I've always been able to smell.”

And so, it starts to overfire in that search for smell, and it ends up creating a smell.

Now, let's move on to taste.

So, our sense of taste—same as sense of smell—in that when we lose our ability to taste, the brain will create phantom tastes.

Phantom Vision
Now, let's move on to vision.

When somebody loses vision, it's actually called Charles Bonnet syndrome, for anybody that wants to go look that up.

When somebody loses vision, the brain freaks out and, you know, starts looking for the vision that it's not able to see and creates phantom visions.

So, this is Charles Bonnet syndrome.

You know, visual snow has some similarities, but Charles Bonnet syndrome is more a direct—it seems, you know, is a more direct occurrence that happens when the brain is not able to see in a way it used to.

Hearing: The Fifth Sense
Well, let's get to number five: hearing.

Now, inside our inner ear, inside the cochlea, which is shaped like a little snail shell, there are these tiny little hair cells that line the inner lining of this snail shell.

So, imagine a tiny snail shell that's turning in on itself. Now, if you take that snail shell and unravel it so that it's in front of you right here, just a—like a line—the hair cells will be sticking up.

You have the high-frequency hair cells here, the low-frequency hair cells down here, and just like a piano, you have every tone in between.

So, if we roll that back up—so let's roll it back up into the snail shell—the mouth of the cochlea corresponds to the high-frequency hair cells. The low-frequency hair cells are deep, deep, deep inside, very well protected.

Now, over our lifetime, air comes through the ear, and it's just a physiology thing. The highest-frequency hair cells chafe off first.

And so, you could honestly say that everybody after a certain age, probably somewhere in your 20s or so, has hearing loss because it's just the nature of time.

So, waves of air come in and start to chafe off the highest-frequency hair cells first.

Now, the brain says, “Wait a minute. I used to be able to hear that frequency. Where is it? It has to be here.”

So, what does the brain do?

It searches and searches and searches, and it gets really frustrated because it can't find it.

And in that search, the excitation of that