When I was younger and more ignorant, I had the impression that Platonically-ideal perception was possible. For example, I had the impression that I heard what was exact reality. But also, from my teens on, I was deeply disturbed by tinnitus and a condition they called “hyperacusis,” that is, pain caused by sounds. Paradoxically, I was also deeply into music and music making. I have much more peace about this bizarre dilemma now, having learned much in the past decades about my perception, the noise therein and the anxious feelings that certain sensations seem to cause.
Once I read someone describe hyperacusis as a not-real condition. Noise in perception seems to me like a confused, torrential mixture of real and non-real, to the point that a clear distinction may not be entirely possible. But for the feelings of pain that sound could provoke, perhaps hyperacusis was a placeholder term to tide me over the quarter-century before I would learn a more subtle, accurate description of my perceptual experiences. Somewhere in between pain caused by loud sounds (hyperacusis) and emotionally-neutral hearing lies misophonia, a concept that I recently learned from Scott Alexander. Scott describes misophonia as belonging to the world of mental health rather than a medical issue with the sense of hearing. Perhaps if misophonia had been an idea within reach in my teens, I would have taken on that label instead of "hyperacusis." But neither hyperacusis nor misophonia exactly describe my relationship with sound, although both are helpful categories.
For a long while, my tinnitus was bothersome to the point of provoking anxiety. The noise in my ears was a near-constant suggestion that my hearing was broken somehow. When I was in my 20s, I got a hearing test which revealed a dip in my right ear’s frequency response around 6 kHz. This dip served as “objective confirmation” for my fears. As the years unfolded, my relationship with anxiety broadened and deepened, in the sense of facing more distress, but I also began reaching better states of peace with a variety of causes of distress. Later hearing tests continued to show no significant hearing impairment, but still the right-side 6 kHz dip. Now I see the dip as a benign non-standard feature of Peter the human, like the congenital funny bumps on my skin on the inside of my right wrist.
Comment from Hacker News:
there is a weird 'information hazard' component to tinnitus. It's like losing 'the game'.
“The game” in this context refers to a juvenile social game where one loses the game if one thinks about the game. The more I thought about tinnitus, the more I gave in to sound-aversion / hyperacusis and hid in a quiet room with foam earplugs in, the more distressed I felt. If I relax and ignore the constant sound in my ears, then the anxiety loses its power. Perception, meaning and emotion dance together; they have no fixed, definite or unchangeable relationship.
I think my hyperacusis was disassembled in part by me detangling the many various sensations of pain in and near my ears. Having foam earplugs in my ears for long enough causes my ear canals to ache (this is so so so bitterly ironic!). Earplug-ache is not the same as pain caused by my unprotected ears hearing too loud a sound (whatever exactly that smorgasbord of sensation is for me). Having over-ear headphones or earmuffs on can eventually cause the area around my ears to ache, or, depending on the design and fit of the headphones / earmuffs, the outer ears (the pinnae) can also be sore. Different designs of earplug / headphone are possible and each design has a different comfort profile over time. And none of this has anything to do with sound per se, it’s all to do with my touch-sensations in and around my ears.
Defense against sound does have a practical aspect. Damage to the hearing system is a real possibility. I maxed out the practical defense side. I have earplugs that are custom molded to fit my ear canals and acoustically designed for flat frequency response (“musician’s earplugs”). I have three different sets of noise cancelling headphones that I use on trains / planes / wherever. I have earmuffs for use with power tools. My smartwatch has a sound level meter. I avoid loud concerts — this one has come at a high cost to me, though. My sound aversion also stopped me from participating in playing loud music. Perhaps I could have joined a rock band as a teen instead of hiding in my bedroom with earplugs in! This is one of my great regrets in life, but when I’m a bit more gentle with myself, I see a self that is simply cut from different cloth. I was not meant to be a guitarist in a touring rock band, for some non-theistic value of the word “meant.”
The COVID pandemic lockdowns was also an interesting natural experiment for me + loud sounds. I stopped being around PA systems, airplane noise, crowd noise, etc. for a long period of time, giving me an opportunity to “reset” my relationship with loud sound. This actually granted a new positive emotional valence to the social event with loud music. Many things rapidly changed at once, but one happy change that has lasted is that I am less reactive to loud sounds now than I was before the pandemic.
Meditation on sound has been helpful for my decoupling perceptions of sound with emotion. The meditation instruction to listen without judging or creating meaning has been helpful for me to be less reactive to unpleasant sound, both from the external environment and the tinnitus that I perceive as being from within me. The therapy work that I have done starting with meanings and emotional triggers has made me realize that some sounds are bothersome because of what they mean rather than what they sound like. For example, if I hear a child yelling, that’s not necessarily bothersome, but if I hear the same yell from my own child, then that same sound has much more power. In some ways, this is a trivial conclusion: the gunshot sounds in a movie are fun, but a gunshot sound from the street in front of your house is literally an emergency. But many sounds are both bothersome to me in the realm of perception and in the realm of meaning. The yelling child sound is pretty annoying, even if it came from a speaker during a movie (I would turn the volume down).
Detangling perception, meaning and emotion for sounds has been helpful to me. Meditation has been one avenue and emotion-meaning work has been another. Now, I have started to notice the subtleties of my perception of sound in a more finely grained way. Another strange perceptual quirk has entered my awareness. Certain sounds, especially the loud, transient sounds with sudden onsets seem to provoke touch / proprioceptive-like sensations. Some sounds hit me, but not like being punched with a fist, more like crashing my torso into a gym mat. What is this? Am I reflexively tensing collections of muscles when I hear certain sounds? Do I actually have sound-to-touch synesthesia? Am I actually noticing something that is common to many people’s experience, but they usually ignore (as is the case, I think, for tinnitus and noise in the visual system)? Perhaps this bodily sensation is connected to my experiences earlier in life that I called “hyperacusis”, which is pain caused by sound.
Back to noise: I hear stuff in silent rooms. I also see dynamic textures in perfectly flat colors. I see colors and textures when my eyes are shut in a dark room. Some of the noise that I see is actually myself: for example, the white blood cells wandering through the capillaries in eyeballs. I’ve heard that some kinds of tinnitus are actually the ear hearing the body, perhaps even the sounds caused by neural activity.
The noise in my visual system never bothered me as much as my tinnitus. I wonder why the hearing-modality noise bothered me so much while the sight-modality noise didn’t. I care a lot about both senses, although hearing has always been my favorite. I think it’s because I developed a cycle of fixation and anxiety about tinnitus (and I noticed the tinnitus first). But my default-state equanimity about my visual perception noise actually gives me courageous motivation to chill out about tinnitus.
For a while, I had recurring “referred pain” sensations in my wrists and hands. (Fortunately a skilled physiotherapist managed to fix this.) The referred pain caused a lot of anxiety, while it was there, 2012-2019, but for a long time I hovered between catastrophizing that it would end my career and delaying doing anything about it. The referred pain was really in my body and not only my mind, at least I think so, because it got better with treatment focused primarily on the body. The referred pain was so full of noise that it couldn’t quite be pinpointed exactly where it hurt. At one point, I was trying to communicate my pain to a doctor, so I put a dot on each point that hurt with a marker. The dots were all over my hands, never in exactly the same place twice.
I don’t get phantom smells, and I often have the experience of “not smelling anything right now.” Side note: I did lose my sense of smell, twice, during the same episode of having COVID. And, my mother is anosmic: she cannot smell. She can taste just fine -- a difficulty for uneducated theorists of the senses. I am glad to be able to smell. Maybe if I worked harder at smelling, I would start noticing the noise of smell perception; I assume noise is like certain views of God in that it is omnipresent.
I find the philosophical need to reject the Platonic ideals in their more conventional forms. When I was in college, I tried to shock people by saying that I didn’t believe in numbers. Now, I try not to wallow in that thought-blackhole: whether or not numbers are “real” is not a question that I can help answer and the result makes no difference to me. But whether or not I am constantly and vividly hallucinating a haze of unreal perceptions seems a lot more important! “Hallucination” carries a strong negative valence. But it’s also the wrong description, in my case. Even the most vivid of migraine auras and the loudest ear-ringing are clearly distinguishable as not-real for me. Instead, what I think I’m perceiving is a signal from reality plus sensory self-noise.
Reality doesn’t come as a convenient mixture of signal plus noise. (No Platonic ideals!) Even the current through a conductor has some intrinsic noise due to the thermal motion of the electrons. Noise is part of reality. I’m part of reality. And noise is part of me. I’m part of the noise. I am noise (partially). And there’s no reason to be concerned about that.
Why am I writing this essay? Surely, my perception, my experience of the world is actually different to the bulk of humanity. The so-called-real and the so-called-not-real tango in my perception, hopefully guiding me to wise action and happiness, but there are no guarantees.
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