Idiopathic Tinnitus: A Testable Bio-Electronic Behavioral Analogy — The Wave-Interference Interpretation of Tinnitus (WIIT)

Abstract

Idiopathic tinnitus—subjective, audiogram-independent, without an identified medical etiology—remains without a satisfying explanatory account for a substantial subset of cases, and no directly comparable methodological precedent linking such presentations to documented interference phenomena in engineered signal channels has been identified. This paper proposes the Wave-Interference Interpretation of Tinnitus (WIIT), a testable bio-electronic behavioral analogy in which, under a WIIT-eligible presentation, the auditory pathway behaves as if subject to interference matching — functionally, not structurally — documented interference behavior in low-power electronic audio channels exposed to a wave-type source (unnamed, assumed). WIIT does not claim to replace existing accounts of tinnitus; it offers a parallel, testable explanation for a specific unexplained subset, aimed at motivating empirical work that could support or falsify it.