Comment by retrac

This tracks with what is known about sudden neurologically-involved hearing loss. I have a condition where the inner ear is misformed and the cochlea is, in crude terms, prone to bruising. I've hit my head and gone completely deaf on one side before, and some of my hearing came back but not all of it.

This sort of injury, with the missing sensory input, triggers brain plasticity. A lot of relearning goes on very quickly. It took only a few days until voices stopped sounding like chipmunks because I could not hear the low frequencies. I still couldn't hear them but I was starting to associate the new inputs with my memories of how I remember speech sounding. If I knew the person the voice was strongly gendered as male or female - with new speakers I had trouble guessing their sex. I still do.

From what little is known about this, exposure to sound is crucial during this phase. And a lot of people find it highly distressing. I was gripping my hands like in a panic/stress reaction when out in public in noisy environments. It is, paradoxically considering the quasi-deafness, a kind of sensory overload. Sounds I couldn't identify, coming from the wrong direction, with human voices sounding like garbled squeaks. A common reaction is to withdraw. But this almost certainly prevents relearning during the crucial phase of plasticity. I wish I had forced myself to go to more restaurants etc. immediately after, in hindsight. I suspect it may have resulted in less tinnitus long-term if I had done so.

This is so little studied it surprised me how little is out there when I went researching on what the best conditions to expose myself to after. I kind of had to make up a protocol myself.