This morning was a little different.
I had an appointment before work, which meant I didn’t need to rush straight into the clinic. The break from routine was a welcome change. After the usual morning chaos of getting everyone organised and out the door for school and work, the house finally became still. Or so I thought.
I poured myself another cuppa and sat down to enjoy a few quiet minutes before getting ready myself. As I sat there, I became aware of the birds outside. Then the neighbour’s dog. A car passing in the distance. And then the gentle hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen. It made me reflect on something worth sharing.
None of those sounds had suddenly appeared. The birds had been singing all morning. The neighbours hadn’t just stepped outside. The fridge hadn’t suddenly switched on. The sounds were already there. My awareness had simply shifted. Long before we consciously hear a sound, our auditory system has already gone to work.
Every second of every day, our brains are scanning the environment, asking: Is that important? Is that familiar? Is that safe? What deserves my attention? Most of this happens completely outside our awareness. In fact, the remarkable thing isn’t that we hear so much. It’s that we successfully ignore so much. The rustle of leaves. The hum of an air conditioner. The distant traffic. The refrigerator in the kitchen. They’re still there.
Our brains have simply decided they don’t require our attention. As an audiologist, the more I learn about tinnitus, the more I appreciate that tinnitus isn’t really about sound. It’s about attention. For a variety of reasons, the brain can decide that an internal sound deserves monitoring. It places that sound into the “important” category and continues checking in on it, again and again.
The result is that the sound remains at the forefront of awareness. What I find encouraging is that the same brain that learned to pay attention to tinnitus also has an extraordinary ability to adapt.
Because hearing isn’t simply something our ears do. It’s a remarkable subconscious process that helps us connect, communicate, navigate uncertainty, and stay safe. Most of the time, we never stop to think about it.
Perhaps we should.
