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Human sense receptors quickly become insensitive to constant stimulation and even the human brain can effectively filter out and ignore constant stimuli. For example, people living by a busy road soon ignore the noise of traffic and even sirens are hardly noticed. I used to live close to a highway, but never noticed the noise, except for the occasional exceptionally noisy truck or motorbike, even though the actual traffic noise was constantly changing. Why is it that people who suffer from tinnitus cannot do this?

Rich
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  • Remember the need for showing your own research when posting a question. Perhaps look into the basis for tinnitus itself. The Wikipedia article seems to be a good starting place. – Jiminy Cricket. Mar 01 '24 at 16:49
  • I think this question is the same as "what is the mechanism of tinnitus?" or similar; otherwise it's a bit tautological. Like any disease or disorder, tinnitus is what happens when the brain "creates noise" instead of filtering it out. There's no real sound in tinnitus, unlike the highway example. – Bryan Krause Mar 01 '24 at 17:00
  • "Why is it that people who suffer from tinnitus cannot do this?" Why do you think they can't? I've had tinnitus for about 50 years. While it was quite noticeable initially, I hardly ever notice it now. It's not that it's gone at times; it's always there. It just doesn't register most of the time. – anongoodnurse Mar 01 '24 at 17:05
  • @BryanKrause - That doesn't mean it never gets "tuned out". I know it's very distressing to some people (it must be worse than mine.) But I definitely tune it out; sometimes even if there's dead silence, it doesn't register unless I think about it. – anongoodnurse Mar 01 '24 at 17:12
  • @anongoodnurse Sure, but the symptom of tinnitus is specifically the experienced sound. If you're tuning it out and not hearing it, your tinnitus is by definition reduced or absent. – Bryan Krause Mar 01 '24 at 17:16
  • The link to the previous question does state that when the initial event is not traumatic people do experience spontaneous habituation. So this does answer my question. – Rich Mar 01 '24 at 19:57
  • @BryanKrause - I'm not sure I agree. The sound is always there. People can get used to a lot of things if they've had it for almost 50 years. I know the difference between fluctuating tinnitus (how it presented initially) and what I have now. It's not a case of now it's here, now it's not. – anongoodnurse Mar 02 '24 at 00:07
  • @BryanKrause - In one of the links in the previous answer, there is a mention of habituation, but it also stated that if someone has had tinnitus for more than 2 years, it's probably permanent. I wasn't able to tune it out initially for, I'd guess, a decade. I distinctly remember my surprise the first few times I realized i had tuned it out. – anongoodnurse Mar 04 '24 at 14:23

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