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.
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