Ears Sound
Autophony
Your own voice, breathing, or heartbeat sounds far too loud inside your head. It can mean a tube or a thin patch of bone is letting sound take a shortcut into the ear.
About 0.3–6.6% for patulous Eustachian tube
Sound
Noises the body makes or that you hear from inside it.
Showing 8 oddities.
Sound entries are noises the body makes, or noises you hear from inside your own head, with a clear physical cause. Stomach growling, hiccups, and tensor tympani thump all have a mechanism you could point to on a diagram.
This kind is narrower than involuntary. An involuntary entry like tinnitus also produces a sound, but the cause is a signal invented somewhere in the hearing system, not a real vibration. A sound entry has an actual vibration, gas bubble, or moving part behind the noise.
The boundary case is autophony, where your own voice sounds unnaturally loud inside your head. The sound is real, carried through an actual gap or thin patch of bone, which is what earns it a place here rather than among the invented sounds of involuntary entries.
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Ears Sound
Ear clicking when swallowing
Swallowing opens a small tube between your throat and your middle ear for a fraction of a second. The faint click you can hear is that tube letting air through to balance the pressure.
Everyone
Organs Sound
Hiccups
A hiccup is a sudden jerk of the diaphragm followed by the voice box snapping shut. Everyone gets them, even before birth. The record case lasted 68 years.
Everyone
Brain Sound
Musical ear syndrome
Some people with hearing loss hear clear, complete music that no one is playing. The brain replays stored songs to fill the silence. Most people with it know the music is not real.
3.6% of people sent for a hearing test
Ears Sound
Pulsatile tinnitus
A whooshing or thumping in one ear that keeps time with your pulse. It is usually the sound of blood flowing near the ear. It often has a treatable cause, so get it checked.
Under 10% of people with tinnitus
Organs Sound
Stomach growling
The rumble from your belly is gas and liquid being pushed through your gut by waves of muscle. It is louder when you are hungry because there is less food to muffle it.
Everyone
Ears Sound
Tensor tympani thump
The low thump or rumble in your ears when you yawn or shout is a tiny middle ear muscle tensing to protect your hearing from your own noise.
Everyone
Ears Sound
The sound of silence
In a room that absorbs almost all sound, many people hear their heartbeat, their blood, their breath, or a high ringing. True silence is not possible for a living person.
64–83% of people in studies