A new understanding of tinnitus and deafness could help reverse both

Interesting theory. Not totally related, but early on in covid, my wife and kids were upstairs while I was working in a basement office. The only way I could focus with them scrapping (school over the ipad just didn't occupy much of the day - they breezed through their assignments), was to use high pass filtering headphones (that people call noise canceling - fortunately, they aren't totally). 

The lack of actually hearing things around me for a couple of years messed up my balance a little bit, I think (it's back now) and when the headphones are "on but not on" , blocking some spectra of sound but with no music or anything in them, my brain would fill up the background with a hiss. I'd take the headphones off and it would go away, put them back on and they weren't hissing. that's the part that's related. It must occur because something worse would happen to us with no imagined sound, like getting too sensitive to any subsequent noises. who knows. 

I grew up around farmers. they all had hearing loss. We all listened to loud music when I was a kid - the walkman generation, I guess. Those older guys always told use we'd lose our hearing from the headphones and sight from sitting too close to the TV. I still have my hearing. if you worked around them for a couple of hours, inevitably something would be grinding or hammering on a farm at obscene volume, but they learned to think nothing of it because it was noise of productivity, a positive thing vs. lazy kids with headphones. I've only heard one good thing about that.."sometimes when I'm tired and people are making noise, I just turn them (hearing aids) off and relax".

Tinnitus can really get irritating. One blessing is nagging can be canceled. If I can't hear what she says, she's talking to herself.