Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!purdue!gatech!ftg
From: ftg@gatech.edu (Gary Peterson)
Newsgroups: sci.misc
Subject: Re: dental telepathy
Message-ID: <17053@gatech.edu>
Date: 9 Apr 88 00:44:27 GMT
References: <2267@mind.UUCP>
Organization: School of Information and Computer Science, Georgia Tech, Atlanta
Lines: 49
Keywords: references?
Summary: Personal experience

In article <2267@mind.UUCP>, dean@mind.UUCP (Dean Radin) writes:
> Many of you have probably heard tales of people hearing
> voices and music "in their head," which was later traced to
> orthodontic appliances or fillings in their teeth.  
> 
> ... the physics of how electrolytes and metals in someone's 
> mouth might lead to the hearing of rf broadcasts, or even 
> whether this is a genuine phenomenon?
> 

Well, .... it happend to me once. I accidently bit down on something
hard like a seed and felt a filling get "jammed" in its tooth.
I immediately heard music, quite loud coming to my immediate right
(the same side as the filling). As I turned my head, the music turned,
quite unnerving. The music quickly faded in proportion to the pressure
I was feeling in the filling. (And has not returned.)

Since then I tried to figure out ANY explanation for this phenomanon.
Since I played with crystal radios as a kid I understand the
rf to sound freq. conversion, but the electrical sound freq. to
something understood and transmitted by the ears nerves is VERY
puzzling. (The nerves to the brain are a bundle, with
different frequencies assigned to different nerves in the bundle.)
But I have a hypothesis:

The inner ear is basically two long coiled chambers connected at one end.
The membrane separating them is an ACTIVE feedback mechanism. It amplifies
the sound waves in the chambers. Some people develop a flaw in this
feedback called "tinitis" or "ringing in the ear". Something goes
wrong with the nerve controlling the feedback and the membrane
oscillates on its own. One expert on the subject says that the ringing
can be heard outside the ear using a stethescope since the membrane
vibrates the middle ear bones, which vibrate the eardrum.

My conjecture is that the electrical signal produced by dental work
travels down a nerve to the point where it joins in the bundle of nerves
from the ear, is too strong (really large electrical currents by nerve
standards can occur in the both with the combination of metals plus
saliva), and runs backwards to the inner ear, setting off the
membrane, which oscillates in synch with the signal.
The hair receptors in the inner ear then do their regular job
of converting into the signals sent to the brain.

In any case, this phenomamon should be of interest to people
working on correcting deafness. For those people with damaged middle ears,
this might possibly lead to a partial solution.

ftg@gatech
(And no, I've never seen any flying saucers or talked with Elvis's ghost.)