Training Blog

innitus is a condition where the patient reports hearing sounds in one or both ears but there is no external source.

Doctors previously thought that tinnitus was generated by ear problems. However following claims by US doctors that it is possible to pinpoint the area of the brain activated when patients suffer from tinnitus it is now widely accepted that the sounds are generated in the brain. The breakthrough was made by at team at Henry Ford Hospital, Detroit who used a special scanner to map the locations in the brain.

The scan is called magnetoencephalography (MEG) and it measures the very small magnetic fields generated by intracellular electrical currents in the neuron cells in the brain.

They played various sounds until the patients agreed that that was the sound they experienced and then scanned their brains while the sound was played.

Here are just a few interesting facts about tinnitus:

• There are approximately 2.3 million sufferers in the UK with moderate or severe tinnitus
• Tinnitus noise can beat in time with your pulse
• Most people experience brief periods of tinnitus after long exposure to loud noise

The results for the MEG imaging showed that those who only experienced tinnitus in one ear the greatest amount of activity was in the auditory cortex on the opposite side of the brain. However those with tinnitus in both ears brain activity was in both sides of the brain, with greater activity appearing in the opposite side of the brain to the ear with the strongest perception of tinnitus. Another part of the brain that was showing high levels of activity on these scans was the lmbic system that governs how we react to things.