Thank you for this terrific review of the information provided here. The presentation was fascinating. Until 1988 when the National Institutes of Health established the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), very little research was being done in this area. The prevailing attitude was that the ear & hearing organs were inaccessible due to placement in the brain. Sensorineural hearing loss was called 'nerve deafness', and it was assumed that the auditory nerve was dead. Lo and behold, it wasn't dead in the majority of cases. It was not being stimulated due to the failure of hair cells in the cochlea. Enter cochlear implants that have been able to bypass the cochlea and stimulate the auditory nerve and get sound signals to the auditory center of the brain for interpretation. Anything is possible. So thankful this kind of research is being done now.

I hope the presentation on tinnitus will be just as enlightening and hopeful.