Tinnitus & Other Phantom Sensations: When the Brain Searches for What It No Longer Perceives

By Dr. Jennifer Gans

How Missing Sensory Input Creates a Phantom Sensations—and Why Understanding This Changes Everything
 

Tinnitus is not a disease. It is a perception—a normal brain response to reduced or missing sound input.

Tinnitus often arrives with startling clarity—a ringing, buzzing, hissing, pulsing, or soft electrical tone that seems to appear from nowhere. For many, the onset is frightening. It can feel as though something must be wrong inside the ear, or worse, inside the brain. Yet understanding the brain and how it works is profoundly reassuring:

To understand tinnitus is to understand the remarkable ways the brain interprets, predicts, and fills in sensory information. When we appreciate this, the experience of tinnitus shifts from threatening to understandable—opening the door to relief.

 
The Brain’s Job: Predict, Interpret, Fill In

The human brain is not a passive receiver of sensory data—it is an active prediction machine. Every moment, it compares incoming information to what it expects, filters out what is irrelevant, and fills in the gaps when information is missing.

Because of this predictive design, every sensory system has its own form of phantom perception when input is reduced:

Hearing – Reduced sound input – Tinnitus

Vision – Loss of visual signals – Charles Bonnet Syndrome-visual hallucinations

Touch/Proprioception – Loss of limb feedback – Phantom limb pain

Smell – Damaged olfactory nerve – Phantosmia (phantom smells)

Taste – Reduced taste input – Phantom tastes

 

These experiences are not signs of imagination or pathology—they are evidence of a brain attempting to solve the puzzle of absent data.

How a Phantom Sound Emerges

The brain does not like to ‘lose’—it strives to fill in what is missing. When the auditory system receives less input than expected—due to hearing loss—the brain searches for the sound that it no longer perceives. The neural excitation caused by fruitless searching for a sound that is no longer able to be perceived results in tinnitus.

Whether tinnitus is experienced as bothersome, non-bothersome, or not perceived in consciousness at all, depends largely on fear, stress, and anxiety and where this symptom is placed in “triage system of the brain”.

The brain’s triage system: how danger takes over consciousness

The brain operates with a constant triage system—a prioritization process that decides, moment by moment, what deserves access to conscious awareness. Most sensory input never reaches consciousness at all. It is filtered out automatically so we can function without overload.

When a sensation, thought, or signal is evaluated as dangerous or potentially dangerous, that triage system radically shifts.

 
Step 1: Subconscious threat detection

Before we are consciously aware of anything, incoming information is scanned by fast, automatic brain systems—particularly the amygdala and related limbic circuits. These systems ask one primary question:

“Is this a threat?”

This evaluation happens outside conscious control and within milliseconds.

 
Step 2: Threat tagging overrides normal filtering

If the signal is tagged as danger or potential danger, the brain does something adaptive but powerful:

Normal filtering is suspended
The “gate” to consciousness is forced open
The signal is promoted to the top of the triage hierarchy
At this point, the brain treats the signal as urgent, regardless of whether the threat is physical, emotional, or internal.

 
Step 3: The signal takes the “number one slot”

Once classified as a threat, the signal is given top priority:

• It moves to the front of conscious awareness
• It crowds out competing inputs
• It becomes difficult—or impossible—to ignore

This is the brain’s way of saying:

“Nothing matters more than this right now.”

From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes sense. A possible danger must be noticed immediately and repeatedly to keep us safe.

 
Step 4: Sustained attention locks the system keeping the mind “stuck”

The more attention the threat receives:

The more the brain monitors it
The more often it is re-flagged as important
The longer it remains in the top triage position
This creates a self-reinforcing loop:
Attention → salience → continued access to consciousness.

 
Why this system can misfire

This triage system evolved to detect external survival threats. But it does not distinguish well between:

• A tiger in the grass
• An internal sensation
• A benign bodily signal
• A predictive error
• When a harmless internal signal like tinnitus is misclassified as danger, the brain does exactly what it was designed to do—it keeps it front and center.

 
This is not a failure of willpower, focus, or resilience. It is the brain’s protective hierarchy doing its job—just in the wrong context.

 
When the brain classifies a signal as a threat, it is automatically promoted to the number one slot in the brain’s triage system, gaining privileged, persistent access to consciousness until the danger label is removed.

 

Why Some People Are Bothered and Others Are Not
The difference is not the sound—it is the meaning assigned to it. Viewing tinnitus as dangerous amplifies it; understanding it as benign softens it.

 

The Importance of Accurate Education: teaching the brain that the signal—is not a threat
Tinnitus is not a sign of damage. It is a sign of a brain searching for what it no longer hears—and filling the silence with its own signal.

When understood in this light, fear softens, clarity grows, and the brain can allow the sound to fade into the background out of the triage-system of the mind entirely.