WTF tried this and my tinnitus diminished for half a minute. It's back now, but that was interesting.
I think it has to do with how quiet is the environment, as the finger snaps are very loud and drown the tinnitus, but putting on my noise-cancelling headphones without music make it feel louder. Maybe a fan/rain/white noise generator would help people who have trouble sleeping because of tinnitus.
Isn't tinnitus part of your inner ear vibrating itself dysfunctionally (normally only moves sound-dependent for protection), and by giving it one large vibration, you're making it do the "protection" thing, stopping the vibrating?
My understanding was more like the Stereocilia at places corresponding to certain frequencies no longer convert motion to signals.
The flick might be a simulation of an impulse signal which covers all frequencies and tricks the brain into thinking that the absent frequencies were also included in the heard impulse.
Most tinnitus is the subjective kind that doesn’t involve any known physical vibration, it’s just the brain inventing signals. TIL, elsewhere in this thread, that to your point there is also sometimes “objective tinnitus” which is the ear vibrating itself. Mine is the subjective type. There are sound therapies that work for me, temporarily, and the thinking is mainly that hearing tones near the ringing frequencies causes the neurons to send real signal, so that when it stops your brain finally registers that it’s not hearing the tone anymore.
That does not seem like a plausible explanation since the noise does go away and is not persisting. But I'm really curious about why it did work, in the hopes of a permanent solution.
I think it has to do with how quiet is the environment, as the finger snaps are very loud and drown the tinnitus, but putting on my noise-cancelling headphones without music make it feel louder. Maybe a fan/rain/white noise generator would help people who have trouble sleeping because of tinnitus.