I was reading the New Yorker the other day and I came across an article written by a man who suffered from a condition that caused a constant ringing in his left ear. I was intrigued by this article because I once had also suffered from such a symptom, however it had been in both my ears and drove me crazy! Seriously, it was annoying and I was convinced I was dieing because of this ailment. So it turns out this condition is called Tinnitus and is caused by noise trauma (the more obvious of the factors), foreign objects in the ear canal, and abnormally low levels of serotonin activity. I found the last cause particularly interesting because I assocated my particular condition to the electrical substation that was behind the house I lived in. My idea was that the substation produced some type of low frequency sound that caused the ringing in my ears. Upon further investigation I learned that the magnetic field produced by the substation had been known to cause paranoia in people who resided in close proximity to the substation. This made me wonder if paranoia decreased the amount of serotonin in the brain thus causing the ringing in my ear........though I never felt particularly paranoid. Luckily the ringing stopped after I moved away from that house, vowing to never live by an electrical substation ever again. Still, I always wonder if I had really suffered from a bout of Tinnitus or was simply just paranoid.