My Super Power

There are many downsides to fibromyalgia. But I did get a super power. Unfortunately, it was one that I really did not want. I got super hearing.

Sure, it sounds cool to be able to listen in on distant conversations as if they were right next to you. I have no control, though. Imagine going to a party where everyone is right next to you, talking in your ear. At parties I tend to rely as much on lip reading as anything else as the din is so loud. The same is true in restaurants, where it is as if everyone in the restaurant is now sitting at my table.

It is not as intense as it was, having been reduced quite a bit after I started taking Savella. I get it only occasionally. In the beginning, once it hit it was much of the time. I had to have white noise to sleep. Every sound was loud. Every creak of the house, every sound from outside.

Rain was a nightmare. The problem was that for me, sound was very positional. While I had no control over the volume of a sound, and I could not isolate a specific sound from others to focus just on it, I knew very vividly where that sound was coming from. Even with my eyes closed I could see where that sound was coming from. With rain, it created an incredible soundscape in my mind. I could “see” the backyard in sound. I could visualize where the rain was hitting the roof, the grass, the concrete. Each splatter of rain sounded different, and painted an image in my brain of where it was. I had a remarkable view of the backyard in my mind, just from the sound of the rain. It was like trying to sleep with my eyes open.

Super hearing has a name: hyperacusis. It can be triggered by stress, illness, or brain injury. One of the most famous people with hyperacusis was Nicola Tesla, the beyond brilliant inventor who developed the system that now brings electricity into our homes. In his autobiography he wrote:

“In Budapest I could hear the ticking of a watch with three rooms between me and the timepiece. A fly alighting on a table in the room would cause a dull thud in my ear. A carriage passing at a distance of a few miles fairly shook my whole body. ”

It took awhile for me to adjust to it. A neighbor opening their front door sounded like our front door was opening, which was quite startling. While shopping in the grocery store, people talking in the next aisle sounded like they were standing right next to me.

Like all my other symptoms, my super hearing comes and goes, and it is now less intense and less often than it was. For people with hyperacusis, though, this increased sound is all of the time and can be devastating. Sound becomes painful and at times unbearable. Some wear ear plugs all of the time.

There is a treatment for hyperacusis. It involves sound therapy, in which the brain is retrained to hear sound.

Like smell and touch and taste and sight, hearing is a much more complex task than just listening. Sound is filtered and manipulated by the brain. The type of sound we listen to determines what parts of the brain get involved.

If what we are hearing is language, it is shuttled off to Wernicke’s area in the dominant temporal lobe. This is where the process of decoding the abstract meanings of words takes place.

If we are listening to music, many parts of the brain become involved. The forebrain interprets the structure and overall meaning. The nucleus accumbus and ventral tegmental areas of the brain respond to the sound of music by releasing dopamine, which is why listening to music makes you feel good. Also making you feel good are the positive emotional reactions we have to it which are triggered in the cerebellum. The medial prefrontal cortex responds to the emotional memories that music evokes from past experience. Listening to music is an incredibly complex process for the brain.

Before it can even get to all these tasks, the brain first has to filter out and separate all of the elements of sound coming into it. This is a task made much more difficult for those suffering from hyperacusis, where everything can get mixed up into one big jumble of noise.