Inhibition of Oscillation in a Plastic Neural Network Model of Tinnitus Therapy Using Noise Stimulus

摘要

Tinnitus is the perception of phantom sounds in the ears or in the head. Accordingly sound therapy for tinnitus has been used. To account for mechanisms of tinnitus generation and the clinical effects of sound therapies from the viewpoint of neural engineering, we have proposed a plastic neural network model for the human auditory system. We found that this model has a bistable state, i.e., a stable oscillatory state and a stable equilibrium (non-oscillatory) state coexist at a certain parameter region. This paper describes inhibition of the oscillation for various kinds of noise stimuli, because noise stimuli are presented to tinnitus sufferers for therapeutic purposes. Through several numerical simulations it was shown that noise stimulus can inhibit the oscillation (similar to residual inhibition as seen in clinical studies), however, the oscillation is not inhibited in all cases, i.e., the effect of inhibition is not pervasive as in the case of inhibition in clinical cases.