ScienceAlert – Those who have never endured the relentless ringing of tinnitus can only dream of the torment. In fact, a bad dream may be the closest some get to experiencing anything like it.
The subjective sound, which can also be a hissing, buzzing, or clicking, is heard by no one else, and it may be present constantly, or may come and go.
Neuroscientists at the University of Oxford now suspect that sleep and tinnitus are closely intertwined in the brain.
Their findings hint at a fundamental relationship between the two conditions – one that has, surprisingly, been overlooked in the brain until very recently.
“What first made me and my colleagues curious were the remarkable parallels between tinnitus and sleep,” neuroscientist Linus Milinski at Oxford’s Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute told ScienceAlert.
“Tinnitus is a debilitating medical condition, whereas sleep is a natural state we enter regularly, yet both appear to rely on spontaneous brain activity. Because there is still no effective treatment for subjective tinnitus, I believe that exploring these similarities might offer new ways to understand and eventually treat phantom percepts.”
A ‘phantom percept’ is when our brains fool us into thinking we are seeing, hearing, feeling, or smelling something that is not there, physically speaking.
Many people only experience phantom percepts during sleep, but for around 15 percent of the world’s population, an inescapable noise rings in their ears during waking hours, too.
Tinnitus is the world’s most common phantom percept, and yet there is no known cause or cure, despite a long list of hypotheses.
While many individuals with tinnitus report poor sleep and show poor sleep patterns, the potential connection to this crucial bodily function has only recently come to light …
