How to protect your hearing & help prevent tinnitus and avoid making your existing tinnitus worse. Dr Konstantina Stankovic, MD, PhD (Chair of Otolaryngology ⁦Stanford Medicine⁩) on the Huberman Lab podcast out now:

@StanfordMed A crucial but often missed point: protecting your hearing is also about protecting your cognitive bandwidth. The brain energy spent filtering constant noise or coping with tinnitus is energy stolen from deep thought and focus.

@StanfordMed I’m deaf and have several older deaf friends. From what I see, none of them show signs of dementia. Has anyone come across data showing whether being deaf (especially lifelong deafness) increases dementia risk later in life?

@StanfordMed Deafness does not lead to dementia because people who are deaf rely on lip, reading and sign language. In some sense partial hearing loss is worse because people don’t realize the deficit, but with less sensory input, their brain starts to suffer or cognitive decline.

@StanfordMed What if hearing people know sign language, like my hearing wife and daughter. Sometimes they communicate only in sign language. So would it still matter if they lost their hearing?

@StanfordMed How do I get rid of my long lasting continuous tinnitus?

@StanfordMed Don’t take vaccines

@StanfordMed Tinnitus is worse than câncer and society don't no.

@StanfordMed Wow Good to know that. Especially when are you working into a noisy environment

@StanfordMed I feared HBOT can cause it as there were many reports about it, but in my case 1.3 pressure and 35 sessions over the course of 3 months didn't result in any kind of ear ringing. But it has kept me a bit scared and "looking" for ringing clues ;)

@StanfordMed Love the traditional embroidery on her blouse , we have exactly the same in Bulgaria .❤️

@StanfordMed Risk assessment: ears included.

@StanfordMed Such a wonderful podcast

This episode really stood out — the point about how our senses are fragmenting through the modern mediums of life feels deeper than it first sounds. We text instead of touch, call instead of see, scroll instead of sense. The brain learns to process reality in isolated channels — visual, linguistic, auditory — each trained by a different kind of interface. But historically, humans lived through an integrated world of perception: ritual, music, movement, proximity, the tactile rhythm of community. Our ancestors didn’t experience “sight” or “sound” as separable — meaning was born from their convergence. When language and writing arrived, it changed everything. For the first time, human experience could be detached from immediate presence. Writing made thought portable — but also abstract. We moved from lived sensation to symbolic representation. Over centuries, that abstraction deepened: mathematics, geometry, logic, science. Each step refined precision but fractured immediacy. Civilization advanced through specialization — of knowledge, of senses, of codes. Now, for the first time in centuries, something new is emerging. AI and multimodal systems are reassembling what we separated — translating sound into text, text into image, gesture into motion. This might not be a return to nature, but a reintegration built through code. It’s the first technology that doesn’t just extend one sense, but recombines all. The irony is that after centuries of abstraction, we may be approaching a synthetic form of wholeness — an engineered totality of the senses. If we think about the long arc of culture, we see that our move toward symbolic abstraction was both our greatest gift and deepest fracture. Language and mathematics allowed us to organize the world into coherent systems — what Wittgenstein called “language games” that define the limits of what can be thought. The moment humanity codified experience, it also lost direct contact with it. The world became something we describe, rather than something we inhabit. Symbols, logic, and later digital code — all of these are forms of sensory narrowing. They trade depth for control. This is what civilization is: the art of mediation, of replacing presence with representation. But something fascinating is happening now. With AI, the codes are beginning to turn back toward the sensory. Abstraction is learning to feel. Text now generates sound, sound generates image, and all merge into immersive feedback loops. For the first time, symbolic systems — which once stood apart from life — are beginning to simulate the fullness of perception. This is the paradox: our centuries of codification may lead us back, through machines, to something resembling the ancient unity of experience. But we should ask carefully — what kind of unity is this? It is not the organic unity of shared ritual or body, but the coherence of data. AI reweaves the senses statistically, not spiritually. It builds connection not from meaning but from correlation. So yes, a reintegration may be happening — but through computation, not communion.

@StanfordMed Tell us something NON OBVIOUS

It sounds like a valuable episode with critical insights on auditory health! Hearing protection and tinnitus prevention are crucial topics, especially in an age where noise pollution is prevalent. Did the podcast discuss any specific preventative measures or technologies that are currently in development? #Medicine For anyone diving deeper into biomedical inquiries, consider visiting your comprehensive resource for generating detailed biomedical reviews and answers.

@StanfordMed @grok what did the doc say

@StanfordMed Does anyone here actively protect their hearing? If so, how?

@StanfordMed Is it confirmed that tinnitus always is result of hearing loss !? And what causes the asymmetrical tinnitus like it is in one ear ! Probably some cleaning technique damaged it I am sure the trauma induced by that but some people just develop it out of nowhere is it possible ?

@StanfordMed Yes! This is important! Especially for rock and metal concerts. Also for those who work at these events, and those who record,edit and mix their own music at home.

@StanfordMed protect your ears always