geoff wrote:

Eeyore wrote:
The strangest thing happened to me yesterday.

I was sitting on my bed and rested my head (the temple) on my hand
and I could hear a buzzing. Now, I'd had a bad headache a few days
before but it didn't sound like the tinnitus associated with it.

So, I removed my head from my hand and the sound stopped. Then the
penny dropped, you can get bone conduction hearing.

Sure enough it was the 11W CFL lamp in my bedside light about 2-3 feet
away. If I put my ear up close to it I could hear exactly the same
sound.

Is that curious or what ?

May be the lamp, or not. I get LF tinnitus sometimes when I am stressed or
tired . You could swear there is a humming transformer, resonance, fan, ac,
fridge, or whatever somewhere - but there isn't. Especially at night when
trying to sleep. It can seem very loud (ie not faint background, but very
much 'there'. I even ripped my wall-boards off once, to see if there was a
power cable running past my head (there wasn't).

Other's can't hear it, and you can't measure it. It can seem quite loud.
After years of searching the house and neighbourhood for the source, I
funally realised what it was when I had it way up a mountain , miles from
anywhere, and figured it was (on that occasion) in just one ear !

Sometimes it will strop if I press my jaw near the ear. Once I stuck my
finger in my ear and the hum stopped and it did an orgasmic pulsing thing
instead.

It is known as The Hum, and there are all sorts of conspiracy theories about
it, from weapons research, government mind-control beams, aliens, phantom
planets, the Sun getting ready to implode, electrical feilds, HARRP, gravity
waves, etc, etc, etc. Most adherents to those ideas radically HATE the idea
of something as mundane as (LF) tinnitus.

That could be what you had, and attributed it to the lamp. Or it may have
actually been the lamp (halogen transformer or fibrillating filament).

It was a CFL. And listening up close revealed an identical sound.

Looks like my hearing threshold must still be around 0 dB (phons actually).

Graham