Today, Explained - Is your brain lying to you?

Episode Date: December 21, 2025

Our brain constructs the world we hear, see, and feel — but tinnitus shows how that superpower can backfire. This episode is made in collaboration with Vox's Unexplainable. Hear their series on sound here. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Jenny Lawton, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, engineered by David Tatasciore, and hosted by Jonquilyn Hill. Photo by Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images for the Hearing Health Foundation.  If you have a question, give us a call on 1-800-618-8545 or send us a note here. Listen to Explain It to Me ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's like man's search for meaning, basically, like in your brain. Okay, before we jump in, um, I need you. do me a favor? Uh, how do you pronounce this word? Uh-huh. Yeah. Okay. So, there are two ways to pronounce it. Most people say tinnitus, but all the researchers I spoke to say tinnitus. This is my colleague Noam Hassenfeld. He hosts Unexplainable, a show all about exploring scientific mysteries. When I reported this episode, I said tinnitus. That's the one I chose. Okay, well, normally I'm a tinnitus girl, but when in Rome... Which one do you want to do?

We can go whatever way you want. It's your show. Tenetis is a persistent ringing in the ears, and it can range from mild to straight up debilitating. That was the case for a listener named Kelly. It's like the high-pitched ringing you usually hear in your ear every now and then, but it's like more intense, and it's just there the whole time. She wrote into Unexplanable, hoping to understand, what exactly was going on with her hearing.

She said that she got tenetis something like four years ago when she was about 25. I noticed it around just New Year's time. I just remember there was something on the bright side of my ear going on. And it was going like... Do do do do do. And I thought it was just the pipes. I kept asking my fiancé if he's been hearing something going on in the walls next to me. He wasn't hearing anything.

So that didn't make sense to her. She went to her family. They were kind of like, don't worry about it. But then she started hearing a pitch in her other ear. And this one was just kind of like that straight high pitch, just like, do. And so she's hearing both of these things in each ear. And it's just kind of driving her crazy? I mean, it's like you're just trapped in a room.

With a crying kid, you can't stop crying or anything. You don't know how to just make it stop. She said it got worse in louder environments, so she had to leave her job. She stopped seeing her friends. She had trouble sleeping. I've grown so distant from my friends because with the lack of sleep, you're just not in any other mood for anybody, and you can't show up like you used to for any of the things that you've done.

I've experienced ringing in my ears, before, you know, after a concert or, you know, a night out. But it went away after a little while. That's a version of Tinnitus, too, right? Yeah, yeah. I spoke to this scientist, Stefan Maison, at Mass Ionier Hospital in Boston. He's the director of the Tinnitus Clinic there. And he told me that, yeah, if you go to a concert and, you know, you listen to loud music

and then you leave the concert and it gets really quiet and you just hear that ringing. As they leave the concert, the hearing is not quite the same. You feel that your hearing is a little bit muffled. You can even experience that ringing in your ears. That is a form of tinnitus. That's temporary tinnitus. And it usually goes away. But Kelly's tinnitus wasn't going away.

This is explained it to me from Vox. I'm John Gulenhill. More than 100 million people around the world suffer from this severe form of the condition. And when Noam and his team set out to, to understand why, he learned all sorts of things, not just how we hear, but how our brain shapes the way we perceive everything around us.

So Kelly went to the doctor to try to figure out what was going on, but left her appointments feeling even more confused. When she went to get her hearing checked, her audiologist told her hearing was fine, like she fully passed this hearing test, and that made her feel so crazy, right? She had this thing that was forcing her

pull away from everything in her life, and the doctor's saying, your hearing is fine. That is so weird. Why would a hearing test not pick up on this if it's so persistent? Yeah. So this is what I found so fascinating about this recent research that's been going on. This is research that Stefan was doing at Mass I and Ear in Boston. It's something called hidden hearing loss. Basically, in your ear, there's fibers that respond to soft sounds, and there's fibers that respond to loud sounds. So that means there's fibers that respond to whispers or kind of the ASMR stuff. And then there's fibers that really get activated if you're crossing the street or near an airplane or a vacuum cleaner or something. And on a hearing test, what they do is they

put you in this, you know, soundproof room. The audiologist sits next to you, says, raise your hand whenever you can hear beep. And the beep gets softer. and softer and softer until you can't hear the beep. And what they're doing is just testing the soft fibers. They're just testing if you can hear the quietest possible noise. And if you can hear the quietest possible noise, they say, hey, your hearing's fine. But that doesn't test damage that can happen to the loud fibers. And you can see what happens to people who have damage to loud fibers if you're in a restaurant and notice that you can't understand the person across from you. It might be loud, might be in a bar or something. But if you're in a quiet room,

you'll have no problem hearing the conversation. What's happening there is you have damage in your louder fibers. And that damage is not going to show up on a hearing test. But that damage could lead to tenetous. That's the type of hidden hearing loss that could end up leading to tenetous. So the gold standard of hearing evaluation around the world to this day is completely insensitive to the loss of those fibers. Well, I will say I've been blaming the restaurant situation on the fact that why is there a DJ in here? It's so loud. Well, it's just too loud, right?

I mean, come on. Like, we don't need a scientist to tell us they need to turn the music down at a restaurant. Okay, so hidden hearing loss may factor into tenetous. But whether the ringing in your ears is persistent or temporary, Noam says that buzzing sound is actually your brain trying to tell you something. One of the researchers I talked to Dan Polly, who's also at Mass Ieneer, he said it's basically like a climate control system in your brain. You program it to maintain an ambient temperature, like whatever, 70 degrees.

And then the temperature goes down, you know, 68, whatever. The heat's going to kick on. And like hot air will come out of your vents and bring the ambient temperature back to the set point and then the heating shuts off. Now, what happens in your brain is your brain is kind of doing a similar thing for sound, but when some of the nerve fibers are damaged, you're getting less input than the brain would expect.

And so it's kind of like turning on the heat, so to speak, but it can't get the sound that it needs, so it kind of creates its own sound to fill in that gap. Oh. These neurons, like, sensitize themselves. They're like, oh, I need to make my activity level go back to where it's supposed to be. I'm going to swap out different parts and make myself more sensitive to excitatory inputs.

So now you start to perceive a sound that is not there. The process doesn't work as it's supposed to. Like, the heating system turns on, but it doesn't turn off. Stefan told me it's almost like a form of phantom limb syndrome, where, you know, you might have had your leg amputated. The leg is gone, but it starts to feel pain where it's missing. Now your brain is no longer getting... the nerve input from your leg or your foot.

But it is kind of like creating the sensation it expects to feel. Your brain is artificially increasing the perception. So in the case of touch, if you touch you with my finger like this, you're going to feel my finger. But if I increase the perception, that's going to turn into pain. And in a lot of ways, that's often what's happening with tenetous. Why would our brains do that to us? This is what I find so fascinating, because it just seems like it's this, like, curse, right?

Why would our brain do something so torturous to us? Why would it make up a sound that would keep us up at night? But it turns out, I found out in reporting this series, that this is actually kind of the tip of the iceberg of the way our brain hears the world. And it's kind of the dark side of a superpowers. power that allows us to even hear the world to begin with. So our brain has a superpower. How do we use it for good?

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offer ever. If you head to drinkag1.com slash explain it. You'll get the welcome kit, a morning person hat, a bottle of vitamin D3 plus K2, an AG flavor sampler, and you'll get to try their new sleep supplement AGZ for free. That's drinkag1.com slash explain. It's explain it for $126 in free gifts for new subscribers. We're back. It's Explained it to me. I'm JQ. And we're talking to Unexplanable's Noam-Hassenfeld about Tenidus. And it turns out that annoying ringing in your ears, it's just one example of the way your brain does its job. By the way, you're going to want to put on headphones for this next part. All right. So, tinnitus is your brain constructing a sound when it's not getting the input it expects. It's your brain editing the world you hear. And the thing is, what sounds in tinnitus like it might be a problem, it's actually a necessary way that our brain works in order to let us hear anything at all. So imagine a waveform, right? If you just look at a wave form,

form, it's just going to be a blob of sound. But it's got maybe a word in there. It's got a car honk. It's got a bird song. The world is just a big blob of sound. And somehow our brain can pick out bird song, word, car honk. And it's because our brain can edit this waveform blob of sound. And you can actually hear your brain doing this editing in real time. Oh, oh. Yeah. I would love to hear my brain do something. So I talked to Diana Deutsch, who's this psychology professor at UC San Diego, and she likes to study

all these weird ways our brain edits the world, these weird kind of audio glitches. She loves to research audio illusions. Oh yeah, like do you hear someone saying Laurel or do you hear them saying Yanny? Laurel.

Laurel. Yes, exactly. Oh, okay. It's exactly Laurel Yanny. One of these illusions I love is called the octave illusion. I wonder if I can play it for you. Tell me what you hear. Okay, I hear one note in my left ear and one note in my right ear and they are going back and forth, kind of ping ponging. Low on one side, high on the other, right? Yeah. Okay, I hear the exact same thing. The issue is that there is a low note and a high note on each side. Each ear is getting low,

high, low high, low high, low high, they're overlaid over each other. You think you're just getting low, one year, high, and the other, but you're actually getting two sequences of low high. And the reason you only hear low in one side and high and the other is that your brain is editing the sequence for you. Because your brain needs to separate sounds to make sense of them, right? It has to separate that blobby waveform to pull out the words or the bird song. And And that's what it's doing. It's pulling out high and low and separating them between your ears. Can I make my brain stop doing that? I really have no idea. I cannot listen to this and hear the tones in both sides.

Wow. Like I just hear low on one side, high on the other side, even though I know that that's not actually what the audio is. But in his reporting, Noam found out that people are trying to train their brains. And they're having some success. I even spoke to this science writer named Mike Chorris, who lost his hearing and then got a cochlear implant. And it made everything sound kind of weird and robotic. Like, you ever see that movie Sound of Metal with the... Yeah, Riz Ahmed.

Where the drummer loses hearing, he gets a cochlear implant, and then everything sounds metallic and robotic and glitchy. Yeah. This is not sound like you remember, and it's the implant in your head that's tricking your brain into thinking that you're actually... Amazing movie, but what this guy Mike did is that he practiced and he retrained his brain to listen to music. He really wanted to listen to his favorite piece of music, Bolero. It was kind of my piece of music that I would come to again and again and again to test out new hearing aids. And he practiced listening over and over again. He remembered what it sounded like and he retrained his brain so that it sounded less robotic

and metallic. So this was an iterated process that went on, and it's still going on. And he told me that he can listen to Bolero again and really enjoy it. He actually retrained his brain. He used this superpower. Okay, so does that mean we can train our brains to stop the ringing in our ears? It is not that simple. Tinnitus usually comes from hearing damage, and it's really difficult to figure out the best way to fix that. There are some people out there. thinking about trying to actually fix the damage fibers, like regrow their connections with a protein called neurotrophin. There's another scientist I talked to who's trying to retrain individual neurons using the sense of touch, which is really cool, like playing a tinnitus

sound and then putting an electrode on the spine and kind of trying to activate the individual neurons when that sound is coming in. Kelly tried something different. She tried to do something called masking, which is listening to kind of white noise or pink noise or brown noise that's sort of at the same frequency as her tinnitus, you know, kind of like sleeping with a fan on to drown out traffic noise or something. And it did help her a bit, but some of the researchers I spoke to don't love that idea because it can make you constantly be thinking about the tinnitus even more. And one of the things that can actually make tinnitus worse, is thinking about it.

Like, when I was speaking to Stefan, he told me he had tinnitus. And he was like, and actually, it's way worse than normal right now because we've been talking about it for an hour and it's really annoying. So wait, the way you're supposed to deal with tinnitus is just like not think about it.

That feels like when people tell you like, hey, stop being anxious. And it's like, oh, okay, I'll shut that off. I mean, honestly, it really, really does. It's so frustrating. The best way that is available right now for treating tinnitus does seem to be something like mindfulness. I look at the example of Kelly. She said, okay, I was using these maskers before, but I'm trying not to use the maskers anymore.

I'm trying to let my brain hear the entire world again. I'm actually just trying to take in all the sounds. I'll have the windows open because the maintenance guys are working or the gardeners and And I'm even trying to, like, vacuum without any type of, like, a hearing protection and just recognizing that sound, too. You know, she told me she went to go see fireworks, and at first the fireworks were, like, really upsetting and scary. And she kind of got used to it. This is what we used to do. Like, it's literally just, it's really weird to know the world again.

And that's not to say it's been easy. That's not to say her tenderness is gone. but what she's doing now is just trying her best to hear the tinnitus along with everything else. Has this reporting made you think differently about how our brains work? Oh, yeah. First of all, it's made me so paranoid about my hearing. Yeah. By the end of these conversations with these scientists,

I basically got to the point where I guess I would say that it feels like our brains are just kind of putting on a playoff. for us. Like, we're not actually hearing the stuff that's out there. It's like the stuff that's out there is the script. And then our brain is reading the script for us and acting it out. And that's actually what we're observing. Is our world a lie? Like, what of anything we hear is real? It's not a lie. I think our perception does a lot more work than we would think. Coming up, our brains aren't just interpreting sounds differently. why maybe you shouldn't believe what you see either. Maybe it's just a phase you're going through.

You'll get over it. I can't help you with that. The next appointment is in six months. You're not alone. Finding mental health support shouldn't leave you feeling more lost. At CAMH, we know how frustrating it can be trying to access care.

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in this streaming event for the eras, including the final show in Vancouver. Taylor Swift, the end of an era, streaming now only on Disney Plus. It's explaining to me, I'm JQ, and now we know when it comes to sound, Our brains are shaping what we hear. So what does it do with our other senses?

My name is Pascal Wallish, and I serve as a professor of data science, neuroscience, and psychology at New York University. And I study whether the matrix, the movie, is a documentary. How would it be a documentary? So the question is, does your brain basically create a matrix for you? What is real? How do you define real? So you're not seeing reality unfiltered. We're just living in the matrix, like literally. If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell,

you can taste, and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain. So it's this idea that our senses are subjective. Correct. Because everything that you perceive is filtered for your sensory organs and then goes for your brain. And if we assume that you have a unique brain, which I do, then you're bringing a lot of yourself to what you experience. Okay, so earlier in the show, we heard about how tenetist happens when our brain creates a sound that's not actually there.

Does that happen with other senses, too? In a nutshell, yes. This is general to all the senses, including smell, including taste. For instance, if you think about something like neuropathic itch, where you think there's something itching you, but it's in your mind. But I want to be very clear for those of your listeners who have neuropathic itch, it is very real in your mind, even though your mind. even though your mind generates it. I'm sure you have seen faces in clouds that were not there or faces in your wallpaper.

So this is actually very common, yes. You're seeing meaning everywhere. This is like man's search for meaning, basically, but in your brain. Your brain searched for meaning, and you attach this to everything. Okay, yeah, I have looked up at the clouds and seen things. So that's my brain constructing my visual reality?

Yes, my biggest flex is that I figured out why some people see the dress, the infamous black and blue slash white and gold dress that was serviced in February of 2015. Batten down the hatches. Now time for the great debate, all right? This one has everyone asking, what color is this dress? And now it's being called the dress that broke the internet. Riddle me this, what's black and blue or gold and white and has us debating all over.

By the way, what did you see it as? White and gold or black and blue? I saw black and blue, but my friends saw white and gold, and I was like, am I like, what do you, mean you see white and gold. That doesn't look anything like white and gold. And are you more like a night owl or more like a morning person? I have developed into a morning person. But you historically are a night owl, yes. Yeah. There you go. And so yeah, we had a study where we showed, yes, some people legitimately see as white and gold, some as black and blue. What we could show is it has to do with your assumptions about lighting. If you assume the thing was backlit

or in a shadow or illuminated by white light, bright light, sunlight, it would be white and gold. And if you assume there was artificial light or inside, then you would see it as black and blue. And that has to do with what you have seen more of. So if you're like a night owl, you've seen more artificial light. By the way, just to be clear, it's not going to be true for everybody because this lifestyle is only a proxy for light exposure, but something we can measure. What about with languages? Like, how does that work? So for instance, if you hear a foreign language, at least initially, it might just sound like gibberish to you. Like, you can't even make out individual words. And frankly,

they're not there. If you look at the pure audio stream this is one word of the next like if you listen to Japanese or Italian

so some language has a very Spanish has a very fast like cadence But once you start to learn to learn the language you will start

to hear breaks in the words but they're not there they are put in by your mind there is no objective break between the words

this parsing signal comes from you Oh, wow, that's so interesting. Is there a hypothesis or a reasoning why our brains work this way, why they do this? Of course, absolutely. Your senses is not there for your viewing pleasure. It's there for survival.

So you survive better than otherwise, yes? And if you were sitting around until you have all of the information, all the sense of information is unambiguous, some other animal would have already eaten your lunch, or maybe eaten you. And all of your ancestors that happen to, they're no longer with us. they're in a better place now I guess

but you're the offspring of survivors who the moment they could make a call they made a call they acted on it and often to boost that to boost that time while to be faster you have to put in your own guesses so you basically have to jump to conclusions and the idea is the conclusion can be

wrong but it's better than not to act I'll give an example let's say you're in the forest and there is actually a tiger somewhere in the forest and you start getting a bad sense of it maybe you smelled something faint, maybe you saw a little toe of a tiger somewhere, and then you bolted, you left. Your ancestors were like, I need more information. You want to see the full

tiger before I make any moves, well, they're eaten by the tiger because by the time you see the tiger, it's too late. And what's the cost of being wrong? Well, you got a little scared, but that's okay. You know, we can live with that, literally. Maybe a little scared. We have anxiety disorder. It's not great, but you are alive. Whereas if you're wrong in the other way, you're dead, and you cannot reproduce. What does all of this tell us about? how reliable our senses are. Can we trust how we're interacting with the world? Well, overall, they're very reliable.

But you have to understand that they're reliable because of many redundant systems. So, for instance, auditory and visual work together and the other senses too. And there's a lot of information and all that. But different people bring different things to the table. So I think the real lesson is you need to be more modest and more humble about how sure you are about what you think is true. What I mean by that is you see the things, how you see them, right? So you saw it as white and gold or as black and blue.

There's nothing else to it. You believe it is black and blue because that's how you saw it. But the reality is your brain doesn't tell you, oh, we just guessed here. So it makes no distinction between that. So are we living in the Matrix? In all light, dude, yeah. Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream?

How would you know the difference between the dream world? and the real world. Wow. It's like we can trust our brains because they keep us safe, but everything may not always be what it appears. Correct. Here's the reality.

You and I and everybody else who's watching this or listening to this, we're sharing a low-dimensional, three-dimensional, maybe embedding space, but there's a much deeper reality out there that our brain's senses can't see. There's no question about that. It doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

It just means it's deeper than you think. We don't know what it is. It could be anything. How do we remain satisfied? if there's like this world that's right in front of us that we're kind of not experiencing because this is what our brains are doing. Well, I guess to act in the world,

and that's the whole point of why we have the senses, is we have to pretend that this is it. We have to act as if, yes. But this gives you, at least me, a lot of comfort, right? This might not be all there is. There might be a deeper reality out there. So this might not be all there is. And that might be amazing and exciting.

That's it for today. If you want to learn more about how we hear the world around us, you can check out Unexplanable's amazing series called The Sound Barrier, wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you hear, you can support us by becoming a Vox member. When you join, you get perks, like ad-free podcasts. Head to Vox.com slash members to join today.

We want your help with an upcoming episode about a simpler time, the golden age of the internet. Are there websites that you miss? Old stuff from the internet you wish you could get back? Tell us about it. Call 1-800-618-8-55 or you can email AskVox at Vox.com. This episode was produced by Avashai Artsy and it was edited by Ginny Lawton. It was fact-checked by Melissa Hirscher and engineered by David Tatashore.

Miranda Kennedy is our executive producer. Special thanks to our friends at Unexplainable. I'm your host, John Glenn Hill. Thank you so much for listening. We're off next week, but we'll talk to you in the new year. Bye!