Tinnitus news...

This will bore the pants off of most of you, but I believe I've made a few important discoveries for people who suffer from tinnitus. Woke up very slowly in the middle of the night with an unusually loud, low note in my left ear. In the five seconds it took to go from dream to waking state, the note faded out completely. But it was clear from the walloping headache I had that this note had been ringing in my head for hours. I was also completely dehydrated.

So, my first discovery, the more obvious of the two, is that there is a direct link between dehydration and ringing. I've known this for a while. When I used to drink, the alcohol would compound the sleeptime dehydrating effect and bring about significant headaches and exhaustion upon waking in the morning, far greater than the typical "hangover" one would get from a glass of wine or two. Tinnitis is a horrible condition. Who can get any meaningful sleep with all that clatter going on?

My second discovery, based on last night's episode, is that not all tinnitus rings are audible to the conscious mind. What is especially interesting here is the suggestion that there are different levels of "hearing" as we pass through different levels of consciousness. Who's to say that this deep brain hearing doesn't exert enormous influence on our behavior and the very shape of our consciousness? Maybe there are multiple sub-systems of eeach of the five senses we have yet to discover.