Tinnitus — a persistent, largely untreatable ringing in the ears — can be is fantastically debilitating. Severe tinnitus sufferers can't sleep, sometimes can't even hear. Now, German scientists are testing a promising tinnitus therapy based on the system used to help amputees recover from phantom-limb pain.
Flor's group has successfully treated amputees by asking them to recognise the position and frequency of non-painful electric shocks applied to their stumps. The shocks stimulated the corresponding brain areas and persuaded them to expand again. This reduced the patients' pain by almost 70 per cent.
Flor believes tinnitus is also a kind of phantom sensation, so her group tried using the same principle in reverse to treat it. They trained nine people with chronic tinnitus to discriminate between different pairs of tones, closely matched, that were pitched at frequencies near to the phantom noises.
The patients trained two hours a day over four weeks, after which they reported a 35 per cent reduction in their tinnitus. A control group that trained using unrelated tones showed no improvement.
