Objectives: Tinnitus is the perception of sound in the absence of an external physical sound source, for some people it can severely reduce the quality of life. Acoustic residual inhibition (ARI) is a suppression of tinnitus following the cessation of a sound. The present study investigated the effect of ARI on brain activity measured using EEG. Design: Thirty adult participants (mean age of 58 years) experiencing chronic tinnitus (minimum 2 years) participated. Participants were presented broad band noise at 10 dB above minimum masking level (1 min followed by 4 min of silence, 4 times) counterbalanced with a control treatment of broad band noise at threshold (1 min followed by 4 min of silence, 4 times) while 64-channel EEG was simultaneously recorded. Tinnitus loudness was measured using a 9-point tinnitus loudness rating scale. Results: The ARI stimulation resulted in a self-reported reduction in tinnitus loudness in 17 of the 30 participants. Tinnitus rating reduced following stimulation but gradually returned to near baseline during 4 min of silence post sound exposure; successive sound exposures resulted in lower loudness ratings. No significant reductions in loudness rating were found with the control stimulation. The EEG showed increases in power spectral density, particularly in the alpha and gamma bands, during ARI compared to the control periods. Conclusions: These results contribute to the understanding of ARI and tinnitus. We recommend that there be a closer examination of the relationship between onset and offset of sound in both tinnitus and nontinnitus control participants to ascertain if EEG changes seen with ARI relate to tinnitus suppression or general postsound activity.
Abstract:The conscious brain poses the most serious unsolved problem for science at the beginning of the third millennium. Not only is the whole basis of subjective conscious experience lacking adequate physical explanation, but the relationship between causality and intentionally willed action remains equally obscure. We explore a model resolving major features of the so-called 'hard problem in consciousness research' through cosmic subject-object complementarity. The model combines transactional quantum theory, with chaotic and fractal dynamics as a basis for a direct relationship between phase coherence in global brain states and anticipatory boundary conditions in quantum systems, complementing these with key features of conscious perception, and intentional will. The aim is to discover unusual physical properties of excitable cells which may form a basis for the evolutionary selection of subjective consciousness, because the physics involved in its emergence permits anticipatory choices which strongly favour survival. 1: Subject-Object Complementarity and the Hard ProblemIn "The Puzzle of Conscious Experience" David Chalmers (1995) summarizes some of the main points of his deÞnition of the now renowned 'hard problem in consciousness research'. He contrasts with the hard problem what he calls the 'easy' problems such as: 'How can a human subject discriminate sensory stimuli and react to them appropriately?' 'How does the brain integrate information from many different sources and use this information to control behaviour?' 'How is it that subjects can verbalize their internal states?' Each of these deal broadly with problems of consciousness, but in ways which could in principle be resolved by straightforward functional explanations.The 'hard problem', by contrast, is the question of how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience. This puzzle involves the inner aspects of thought and perception and the way things feel for the subject -all of them subjective experiences known only to the participant. This is much harder to resolve because trying to compare brain states, which are in principle objective and replicable, with subjective experiences, which, however rich for the experiencer, are unavailable to an external observer, pose a severe problem of qualitative difference, which seems almost unbridgeable.Chalmers rejects any simple resort to neuroscience explanations about brain states in solving the hard problem. He notes for example that the 40 Hz oscillations made famous by Crick and Koch (1992) and others, which might provide an explanation for the coherent binding together of different brain regions, for example visual and auditory into one attended perception, may explain how the brain integrates different processing tasks (an easy problem) but don't explain how any of these modes evoke the subjective conscious experiences of vision and sound. Likewise he rejects philosophical explanations such as Daniel Dennett's (1991) 'multiple drafts' theory of consciousness as an explanati...
T his paper explores quantum and classical chaos in the stadium billiard using Matlab simulations to investigate the behavior of wave functions in the stadium and the corresponding classical orbits believed to underlie wave function scarring. The simulations use three complementary methods. The quantum wave functions are modeled using a cellular automaton simulating a Hamiltonian wave function with discrete (square pixel) boundary conditions approaching the stadium in the classical limit. The classical orbits are computed by solving the reflection equations at the classical boundary thus giving direct insights into the wave functions and eigenstates of the quantum stadium. Finally, a simplified semi-classical algorithm is developed to show the comparison between this and the quantum wave function method.
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