Unrealities

The old man hears little during the day without his aids. At night in bed, he hears rivers flowing and winds blowing inside the head. Often, he would stay awake trying to follow and make sense of the strange white noise, as if from a non existent radio station.

After examination, the doctor summarised. Two ruptured eardrums at 75 years of age cannot do any better with hearing than this. Can try to improve the aids by finer tuning or get a BTE version instead of CIC. The ears are beyond improvement. Almost as a consolation, he added a kind remark that even people with normal ears start losing it at 75 so he is not any worse off.

He then asks about the strange sounds in his head at night and the doctor says : Oh, Tinnitus. The brain creates this noise with everything going on in and around it and fills the inside of the head. With near or complete deafness the outside ambient sound at night is almost none so one hears the sound of this different sort of silence.

Beethoven’s most persistent hearing loss symptom was tinnitus, a ringing in his ears that made it hard for him to appreciate music and conversation outside of his head. It is believed that Vincent Van Gogh suffered from tinnitus as one of the symptoms of Ménière's disease. In his letters, he talks about suffering from ringing in the ears, impaired hearing and intolerance of loud noises. 

As we walk out of the clinic, I am secretly a little sad with a picture in my mind of gradually failing sense organs and a thinning out life but the old man is thoughtful. The buzz he listens to is the sound of his brain working. The nerves and the signals doing stuff. The sound of electrical signals the brain works on. Electrical signal that is supposed to be triggered by external stimulus forms ghost signals which creates the illusion. An out of body-mind self-observing experience for him in the quiet of night. Gone with daylight, daysounds. He googles intently as I take him for a coffee in a cafe close by. He likes the word. Tinnitus.

Sometimes it takes that little to shake the foundation of existence even when you understand it. You watch your brain in action and faltering some. It’s important to be able to sense and smile a little. On the real and the unreal.

Synesthesia for example. Synesthetes can often see music as colors when they hear it, and taste textures like round or pointy when they eat food.

It’s when the signals meant for a type of sense organ get mixed with another and cause the illusion of the other. So you could smell something after you hear a certain sound or hear something after you taste a certain food. Reminds  of a childhood science fiction that somewhere mentioned a reddish food flavour and a mellow yellow scent.

Makes you wonder again why is it unreal, why anything is for that matter, unreal, even if it’s only your reality. Isnt all of reality unique in your mind anyway.

[Melissa McCracken’s chromesthesia]