Three Levels of Hearing
There are 3 levels at which we hear:
1. First Level of Hearing
This is the experience of hearing in any familiar environment. The ambient sounds in our surroundings are heard if we listen to them. In an office, it might be the tapping of keyboard, the hum of computers and other equipment. In the street, it might be sounds of traffic. For the most part, such sounds recede to beyond our immediate awareness - we don't think of them. When we to pay attention to what hear in our environment, we hear those sounds - they are IN our immediate awareness. Once we're no longer giving them our attention, we don't think of them, they are no longer in our immediate awareness.
2. Second Level of Hearing
This is the level of hearing we use when an alerting sound emerges from the ambient sounds in our environment. It might be a telephone ringing in the office, or it might be a siren sounding while we are in the street. We pay it attention, assess the situation and act accordingly; the sound stops or, after a time we afford it less attention and hearing it reverts to 1st level.
3. Third Level of Hearing
The 3rd level of hearing is when we actively listen to a sound. 3rd level hearing is primarily for the purposes of listening to speech, music - what ever we give our conscious awareness (our attention) to.
Tinnitus and its relationship with the three levels
When we first notice tinnitus, it comes in at the 2nd level of hearing. It emerges - just as does any alerting sound. We pay attention to it and assess the situation. Not always a formal, calm, thinking-through kind of assessment - numerous factors are at play here, and they are not the same factors for everyone; however, broadly, there is one of two reactions:
- A person doesn't react strongly to the sound, has a neutral response toward it, thereafter notices it fairly regularly particularly when in quiet surroundings, maintains a neutral response
- A person does react strongly to the sound. When we react with emotion towards the tinnitus - fear it, worry about it, imagine how "bad" it might become, predict "terrible times ahead because of it", or similar negative reactions based on negative meaning(s) we attribute to and associate with it, we unintentionally prime conditioning of the brain to treat tinnitus as a threat. To the brain, threat = threat to survival. Threat to survival is an instinctive reaction triggered in the lower brain. Because the brain now perceives tinnitus as a threat, it becomes a part of our immediate awareness; it has our attention and we quickly develop monitoring of it as a habit, training ourselves to monitor tinnitus automatically / sub-consciously.
There is an article in the CBT4T Substack: Listening to and monitoring tinnitus
Conversely, for a person that has a neutral response:
- To acknowledge tinnitus for what it is - an internally generated sound signal that a large percentage of the population (one-in-seven people) can hear - even when it does enter the 3rd level of hearing, it is in our immediate awareness for just a short time soon receding to the 1st level of hearing where, for most of the time, it is outside our immediate awareness.
The aim of CBT4T is for tinnitus to be at the first level of hearing (outside of immediate awareness) for the majority (90%+) of the time.