Tinnitus and IQ: Is Ringing in the Ears Linked to Intelligence?

There is no evidence that tinnitus is a sign of high intelligence or that it lowers IQ: no study has measured IQ in a large, representative group of people with tinnitus. What research does show is that bothersome tinnitus goes with slower and less accurate performance on attention and memory tasks, with correlations of about 0.3 in a 2020 meta-analysis of 38 studies and 1,863 participants.

This page covers what tinnitus is and how common it is, what the cognitive studies measured, where the "tinnitus means high IQ" idea comes from, and why hearing loss, age and distress make the evidence hard to read. It describes research and is not medical advice. If you have tinnitus, a GP is the usual first stop, and they can refer you to an audiologist or an ear, nose and throat specialist.

The US National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) defines tinnitus as "the perception of sound that does not have an external source," usually a ringing, buzzing or hissing that other people cannot hear. NIDCD cites surveys estimating that 10% to 25% of adults have it. Common causes include loud noise, age-related hearing loss, some medications, earwax and ear infections. Our article on noise and IQ covers what loud environments do to thinking more generally.

The best global estimate comes from a meta-analysis by Jarach and colleagues, which pooled 83 studies. About 14.4% of adults had some tinnitus, rising with age from 9.7% of those aged 18 to 44 to 23.6% of those 65 and older. Men and women had similar rates. The authors estimated that tinnitus affects more than 740 million adults worldwide and is a major problem for more than 120 million of them.

The age pattern matters for any question about thinking. Tinnitus is most common in exactly the age group where hearing loss and cognitive decline are also most common, so all three tend to show up together.

People with tinnitus often say it makes it hard to concentrate, and NIDCD lists effects on mood, sleep and concentration. Researchers have tested this with cognitive tasks.

• An early experiment: Rossiter, Stevens and Walker compared 19 adults with chronic, moderate tinnitus with controls matched for age, education and verbal IQ. The tinnitus group had a shorter reading span, a test of "working memory" (holding information in mind while using it), and was slower and less accurate on the hardest version of a divided-attention task. Anxiety scores did not explain the differences.

• Two reviews in 2016: Tegg-Quinn and colleagues reviewed 18 studies and concluded that tinnitus impairs the "executive control of attention," the ability to direct focus where it is needed. Mohamad, Hoare and Hall reached a more cautious verdict, describing the evidence as "somewhat limited," with some support for effects on executive attention and mixed support for working memory.

• The 2020 meta-analysis: Clarke and colleagues pooled 38 studies with 1,863 participants and expressed every result as a correlation between tinnitus and performance. Tinnitus went with slower responses on executive function tasks (r = 0.35) and processing speed tasks (r = 0.34), more errors on executive tasks (r = 0.30), and lower scores on short-term memory (r = -0.21) and on learning and recall (r = -0.16).

Those correlations are moderate for the speed and executive tasks and small for memory. As a rough illustration, if a correlation of 0.3 came from comparing two equal-sized groups, it would correspond to a gap of about 0.6 standard deviations, or about 9 points on an IQ scale where the standard deviation is 15. That conversion should not be read literally. Most of these were single, often timed laboratory tasks, many studies were small, and Clarke's team found no studies at all that measured "fluid intelligence" (solving new problems) or "crystallized intelligence" (knowledge and vocabulary), the abilities closest to what an IQ score summarises.

The idea that tinnitus signals a high IQ circulates online, but it has no basis in published research that we could find. The closest data points are small and do not support it.

• A German clinic abstract: In a 2008 conference abstract, Manfred Pilgramm and Helmut Lebisch gave a nonverbal intelligence test to 29 patients at a tinnitus centre. The 20 who scored above 100 (average 111.7) reported more distress before treatment and improved more afterwards than the 9 who scored below 100, and after 12 months the two groups reported the same distress. A conference abstract with 29 self-selected clinic patients and no comparison group cannot show anything about tinnitus and IQ in the population.

• Sound sensitivity in gifted children: A 2025 study by Banu Baş and Rukiye Çolak Sivri found that parents of 47 children with WISC-IV scores of 120 or more reported more "hyperacusis" (discomfort with everyday sounds) than parents of 27 children of average ability. Hyperacusis is a different condition from tinnitus, and the ratings were parent reports in a small sample.

• A result in the other direction: Neff and colleagues tested 146 tinnitus outpatients. Higher tinnitus distress predicted lower scores on a multiple-choice vocabulary test often used to estimate crystallized intelligence, and slower performance on a trail-making task, with small to medium effects.

None of these is strong evidence either way. The honest summary is that tinnitus has not been shown to relate to IQ in either direction, and the research that exists concerns attention and speed.

Several factors travel with tinnitus and also affect test scores, which makes it difficult to isolate tinnitus itself.

• Hearing loss: Tinnitus often occurs alongside hearing loss, which NIDCD lists among its main causes, and hearing loss on its own is linked to lower cognitive scores in older adults. Clarke's team tested whether hearing measurement or hearing thresholds changed their results and found no significant effect, but many studies did not measure hearing well.

• Age: Tinnitus becomes more common with age, as do slower processing speed and memory complaints.

• Anxiety and depression: Clarke's review notes that both become more common as tinnitus severity rises, and both can lower performance on timed tasks. Rossiter's study found anxiety did not explain its results, while Clarke's team found that whether a study measured depression partly accounted for differences between processing-speed studies. Our article on anxiety and IQ covers that link in more detail.

• Distress, not just sound: In Neff's study, how distressing patients found their tinnitus predicted their test scores, which fits the idea that the burden of attending to the sound matters more than its mere presence.

Long-term data point in the same direction. In a UK Biobank analysis of 160,032 adults followed for a median of 12.8 years, people with tinnitus had a 10% higher risk of dementia (hazard ratio 1.10, 95% confidence interval 1.00 to 1.20). Among those with tinnitus, people with moderate or severe tinnitus had a 64% higher risk than those with the mildest tinnitus. This is an observational association, and it cannot show whether tinnitus, the hearing damage behind it, or something else drives the risk.

Treatment research offers useful context. A 2020 Cochrane review of 28 trials with 2,733 participants found that cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), compared with no treatment or a waiting list, may reduce the impact of tinnitus on quality of life by about 11 points on a 100-point handicap scale, though the evidence was rated low certainty. Those trials measured distress and quality of life, not cognitive ability or IQ.

No study has shown that it does. Tinnitus is linked to slower and less accurate performance on attention, speed and memory tasks, but no study in the main meta-analysis measured reasoning or knowledge directly.

There is no good evidence for this. The only data we found were a 29-patient conference abstract from a German tinnitus clinic, which cannot answer the question, and a 2021 clinic study in which higher tinnitus distress went with lower vocabulary scores.

Researchers think attending to the sound draws on the same limited attention needed for demanding tasks. Studies find the clearest effects on executive control of attention, especially when tinnitus is bothersome.

It may slow performance on timed tasks or make concentration harder, particularly for people who find their tinnitus distressing. Testing in a quiet room when you feel rested may help you perform closer to your usual level.

NIDCD suggests starting with your primary care doctor, who may refer you to an otolaryngologist (an ear, nose and throat specialist) or an audiologist.

Tinnitus is common, especially after 65, and bothersome tinnitus goes with slower attention and memory on cognitive tasks. Nothing in the research supports the idea that it signals a high IQ, and nothing shows it lowers reasoning ability itself. If you want to see how your reasoning compares with the population, pick a quiet time when your tinnitus is least intrusive and take an online IQ test built by psychometricians.

1. National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. (2023). Tinnitus. [nidcd.nih.gov](. nidcd.nih.gov

2. Jarach, C. M., Lugo, A., Scala, M., van den Brandt, P. A., Cederroth, C. R., Odone, A., Garavello, W., Schlee, W., Langguth, B., & Gallus, S. (2022). Global prevalence and incidence of tinnitus: A systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA Neurology, 79(9), 888-900. [doi.org/10.1001/jamaneurol.2022.2189](. doi.org

3. Rossiter, S., Stevens, C., & Walker, G. (2006). Tinnitus and its effect on working memory and attention. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 49(1), 150-160. [doi.org/10.1044/1092-4388(2006/012)](. doi.org

4. Tegg-Quinn, S., Bennett, R. J., Eikelboom, R. H., & Baguley, D. M. (2016). The impact of tinnitus upon cognition in adults: A systematic review. International Journal of Audiology, 55(10), 533-540. [doi.org/10.1080/14992027.2016.1185168](. doi.org

5. Mohamad, N., Hoare, D. J., & Hall, D. A. (2016). The consequences of tinnitus and tinnitus severity on cognition: A review of the behavioural evidence. Hearing Research, 332, 199-209. [doi.org/10.1016/j.heares.2015.10.001](. doi.org

6. Clarke, N. A., Henshaw, H., Akeroyd, M. A., Adams, B., & Hoare, D. J. (2020). Associations between subjective tinnitus and cognitive performance: Systematic review and meta-analyses. Trends in Hearing, 24, 2331216520918416. [doi.org/10.1177/2331216520918416](. doi.org

7. Pilgramm, M., & Lebisch, H. (2008). Quality management in tinnitus therapy [Meeting abstract]. 79th Annual Meeting of the German Society of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, Bonn. German Medical Science, Doc08hno09. [egms.de](. egms.de

8. Baş, B., & Sivri, R. Ç. (2025). Hyperacusis in gifted children and its impact on quality of life. European Archives of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology, 282(6), 3303-3309. [doi.org/10.1007/s00405-025-09389-7](. doi.org

9. Neff, P., Simões, J., Psatha, S., Nyamaa, A., Boecking, B., Rausch, L., Dettling-Papargyris, J., Funk, C., Brueggemann, P., & Mazurek, B. (2021). The impact of tinnitus distress on cognition. Scientific Reports, 11, 2243. [doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-81728-0](. doi.org

10. Zhang, Q., Shi, M., Zhang, J., Wang, X., Chen, Y., Yin, X., & Zhang, Y. (2025). Tinnitus, noise exposure and the risk of dementia: A prospective cohort study based on UK Biobank. Age and Ageing, 54(4), afaf097. [doi.org/10.1093/ageing/afaf097](. doi.org

11. Fuller, T., Cima, R., Langguth, B., Mazurek, B., Vlaeyen, J. W., & Hoare, D. J. (2020). Cognitive behavioural therapy for tinnitus. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2020(1), CD012614. [doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD012614.pub2](. doi.org

Hero image: A tuning fork placed on sheet music 2, by Lukasz Kobus, European Commission, CC BY 4.0. Via Wikimedia Commons.