Hi,
My name is Itay and I am one of the developers in the OpenHTM project..
I didn't know if to post this on nupic or on offtopic, since this is a brain
and neuroscience related subject..
I received a constant ringingone day about three months ago. This medical
phenomena is called "Tinnitus".
Mine is relatively mild, but there are people with tinnitus so loud that it
sounds like a fire alarm hanging above their head.
Imagine hearing this all day, 24/7, every minute, every second.
Tinnitus research is receiving very low budget, despite billions of dollars
worth of treatments for sufferers. The current treatments are extremely
ineffective. They are like using a house fan to keep a fly out of the house.
and are not very useful.
I was wondering if anyone on this community (especially Jeff) and anyone who
have read substantial research papers on brain anatomy and mechanism, can help
to shed a light on what could be done and how tinnitus might be formed.
No one in the scientific community have a clear answer why there are people who
developed tinnitus, and the current researchers on the field are a joke. this
is the same thing with brain research and AI : barely no one digs into the real
core biological stuff and brings theories and solutions.
The current theory is that not enough sound is brought from the sound nerves to
the auditory cortex. and then the auditory cortex is getting over-excitatory,
and generating false non-existant sounds. But with that theory, why some people
develop it and some don't? seems like it's not the absolute truth and that
there is more to it. some people can even modulate this sound by activating the
muscles on their faces. The theory is because the somasensory cortex is close
to the auditory cortex.
This problem is not special for humans. This is also occurring in mice after
noise exposure!
After a few months this transient phenomena becomes a chronic one, because it
centralizes in the brain (the brain learns this sound and starts playing it on
it's own)
However, I wonder how prolonged non-breaking neural loop is able to be
sustained for so long (for years) between brain regions, and how can it be
stopped and this memory to be deleted completely. The "permanence" value of it
must have gone up the roof :)
I know that this is a different subject than artificial intelligence, but with
your expert knowledge about brain mechanisms perhaps more light could be shed
on this problem.. and perhaps it can be simulated using hierarchical version
(with feedback) of the CLA.
Thanks for every respond.
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