Many people are familiar with tinnitus, also known as a persistent sound that the ear is ringing. It is a very common symptom and it can occur for a variety of reasons including injuries or disease. Up to one in five people experience tinnitus on a semi regular basis. Although the condition is common, scientists did not have a pinpoint of the actual physical cause until now. Without knowing what caused it, it was near impossible to treat.

Some researchers at the University of Iowa decided to map out the networks of the brain that are involved by using a particular brain monitoring technique. The brain monitoring technique is one that is used during surgeries to treat epilepsy.

Using the brain monitoring technique, the researchers measured activity in the brain when the participants were having bouts of tinnitus, as well as when they were being exposed to external sourced sounds that sound similar to the effect of tinnitus.

Will Sedley of Newcastle University in England spoke out about the findings.

“Perhaps the most remarkable finding was that activity directly linked to tinnitus was very extensive and spanned a large proportion of the part of the brain we measured from. In contrast, the brain responses to a sound we played that mimicked [the subject’s] tinnitus were localized to just a tiny area,” he said.

This is important to know that the tinnitus spreads to different areas of the brain besides those having to do with hearing. Tinnitus is perceived as hearing a sound that isn’t there, but it is not encoded in the brain the way that a normal sound would be. With so many pathways in the brain being involved in “hearing” the ringing it is quite hard to treat the condition.

According to the co-author of the study Phillip Gander, “The sheer amount of the brain across which the tinnitus network is present suggests that tinnitus may not simply ‘fill in’ the ‘gap’ left by hearing damage, but also actively infiltrates beyond this into wider brain systems.”