What if you end up in the third panel yourself?
The Hearing Triptych - where art, science and life meet
Sometimes you unexpectedly end up on the other side of the table. Not as a professional, not as the one who listens, analyzes, explains, or tries to impart something to someone else, but simply as a human being.
I have been working in audiology for over twenty-five years now, primarily with people who experience tinnitus or hypersensitivity to sound. In addition, I work with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, write about psychological flexibility, and give training sessions and lectures on anxiety, avoidance, acceptance, and living a meaningful life. These are subjects that I have not only been extensively involved with professionally, but which I also thought I understood reasonably well by now how they work.
Until my own system started saying increasingly emphatically over the past few months that it was too much.
There was no single event that explained everything. That was precisely what made it so difficult to understand initially. Things began to shift simultaneously in various areas of my life: work, family, my parents, my relationship, responsibilities, art, expectations for the future, and ultimately, my body as well. I did what I always do when things get complicated: reflect, structure, look ahead, try to anticipate problems, and seek solutions before a problem actually becomes a problem.
That ability has brought me a lot professionally. I often spot obstacles quite quickly. Colleagues appreciate that too. But there is a downside to an alarm system that has become excellent at detecting and has almost forgotten how to switch it off. When traffic is approaching from more and more directions, at a certain point, looking even more closely no longer helps.
It was precisely during that period that two worlds unexpectedly came together.
As an artist, I had been commissioned to create a triptych: three separate canvases that were to form a single artwork. At the same time, I was preparing my contribution to TRI Berlin 2026, where I wanted to show how we can view tinnitus and noise sensitivity from different but interconnected perspectives.
Somewhere between painting and thinking about my field, a connection suddenly formed.
Three canvases.
Three perspectives.
On a sheet of paper, I drew three simple rectangles. Above the first, I wrote: Sound. Above the second: Brain. Above the third: Man.
What began as an artistic commission thus unexpectedly acquired a scientific significance as well. The form of the triptych helped me make visible what I had come to feel increasingly strongly during more than twenty-five years of tinnitus care.
How is it possible that two people with more or less comparable auditory findings can experience their tinnitus so completely differently? Why can a sound have hardly any meaning for one person, while for another it comes to dominate virtually their entire life?
Looking only at the ear does not provide a sufficient answer to that. But looking only at the brain does not either. And even when we look exclusively at psychological or social factors, we miss part of the story.
During the preparation for TRI Berlin 2026, those three perspectives further developed into Physics, Brain, and Human Experience.
And suddenly the triptych also had a name:
The Hearing Triptych.
The first panel deals with physical and auditory reality. With hearing loss, auditory thresholds, frequency, intensity, loudness, and the properties of sound. This is where audiometry, ENT diagnostics, hearing aids, and other medical, audiological, and acoustic interventions are located. This is the domain in which we can measure a great deal and in which healthcare is traditionally particularly strong.
The second panel deals with the brain. For what our ears register does not appear in our consciousness as a ready-made reality. Our nervous system selects, compares, predicts, and interprets. Attention plays a role, as do expectation, meaning, learning, memory, threat detection, and salience: the degree to which something becomes important to our system. Particularly in the case of tinnitus and noise hypersensitivity, such processes can help determine how much attention an auditory sensation receives and how much tension or distress becomes associated with it.
This is also where interventions such as cognitive behavioral therapy, exposure, and ACT find their place. Not because tinnitus could thereby be reduced to something that is 'all in the head,' but because hearing is never merely a mechanical transmission of sound. Perceiving always also means interpreting.
And then there is the third panel: Human Experience .
Perhaps that is the panel most easily considered as something soft or incidental in medical models. Family, relationships, work, sleep, health, social circumstances, culture, loss, identity, expectations, and values. Everything that is part of the life in which a complaint is experienced.
After all, tinnitus does not take place in a laboratory. It occurs when someone lies awake at night. During a meeting where concentrating becomes increasingly difficult. In a marriage. After losing a job. During illness. In the midst of worries about a partner or parent. At a moment when someone feels safe and supported, or precisely when virtually all other sources of certainty have vanished.
That does not mean that such circumstances simply cause tinnitus. It does mean, however, that the meaning and impact of an auditory sensation are never entirely separate from the person and the life in which that sensation occurs.
That is the core of The Hearing Triptych . Not three competing explanations, but three perspectives that constantly interact with one another. In science and healthcare, we often separate them, because specialization helps us to investigate and treat better. The patient themselves does not live by that separation.
A sentence I use increasingly often for that is:
We separate these models. Our patients don't.
It is important to remain scientifically rigorous in doing so. The Hearing Triptych is not a new biological or causal model of tinnitus, nor does it claim to be. It is a conceptual integration framework. It brings together knowledge from audiology, neuroscience, psychology, and person-centered healthcare, and primarily seeks to make visible what can be lost when a single perspective attempts to become the whole story.
And it was precisely there that the two lines definitively converged.
The triptych I worked on as an artist became DS26001: three acoustically absorbent canvases, each ninety centimeters wide and two meters high. Together, they form a single image of 200 by 270 centimeters.
As the artwork took shape, The Hearing Triptych simultaneously began to take shape as a concept. Art helped me see something I was trying to articulate scientifically; science, in turn, gave new meaning to what was happening on the canvas.
The three parts stand apart from one another. There is literally space between the panels. Yet, you can hardly view them separately. Colors and movements seem to flow from one canvas to the next. What happens in the first panel influences how the second is experienced, and ultimately, what you see only becomes clear when viewed as a whole.
Gold runs through parts of the work. Not as a neat, perfect line, but along irregularities, layers, and fractures. To me, there is something of kintsugi in that: not pretending that damage or change never occurred, but letting it become part of the whole.
The material adds something else to this. The work is painted on acoustically absorbent canvas. As a result, it influences not only what a space reveals, but also how that space sounds. For me, my worlds literally come together there: art and audiology, perceiving and experiencing, Where Art meets Science .
The curious thing is that, while creating the triptych, it was primarily intended to say something about my patients and my field. Only later did I realize that I had ended up right in the middle of it myself.
Especially in that third panel.
My mother is alive. She is still here. And at the same time, I am slowly losing her.
Dementia.
She recognizes me as her son less and less naturally. Sometimes I am just a gentleman who comes to sit with her. Yet something still happens when she looks at me. She smiles. Sometimes she takes my face between her hands, moves my head back and forth a little, and says: “Beautiful.” When we are sitting somewhere, she sometimes pushes my hair aside, because she apparently finds that more beautiful.
She may no longer know exactly who I am, but there is still contact. Just not through names, memories, or family relationships anymore. It is in eyes, touch, and a smile.
Love without explanation.
Now that I am sick at home, something else has unexpectedly emerged as well: time. Time to sometimes join in my parents' fixed ritual. My father is turning eighty, my mother is eighty-two, and as long as they still can, they go to Aachen together.
We park in their usual parking garage and walk through the city towards the cathedral. At Nobis, they have coffee and an egg sandwich. It is hardly anything special, and precisely for that reason, it is starting to take on more and more meaning for me. We walk hand in hand.
On the way from the parking garage to the city, my parents regularly run into the same young man. He sits on the sidewalk in front of a church with a cup in front of him. My parents know him by now, and he knows them. They bring him sandwiches and occasionally give him some money. Recently, I saw my father press twenty euros into his hand.
But it was not that money that touched me the most.
The young man looked at my parents and asked: “Wie geht es Ihren Kindern?”
My parents pointed at me.
“Das ist der Älteste.”
And suddenly, I stood there simply as their eldest son. Not as a clinical physicist, ACT trainer, or artist. Not as someone who had to organize or solve something. Their son, in the middle of a small conversation between people who, over time, had apparently truly come to see each other.
I do not know that young man's story. I do not know why he is sitting there or what has happened in his life. What strikes me most is the matter-of-factness with which my parents approach him. They do not first ask where he comes from, what he believes, whether he deserves it, or to which group he belongs.
There is a person sitting there.
So they see a human.
Perhaps that is also why I understand better why polarization and exclusion can affect me so deeply. Apparently, I grew up with something simple: try to see the person first. Not the group, the label, or the category first.
And suddenly I realize that that, too, is part of the third panel.
In healthcare, we use words like context , participation , quality of life , and person-centered care . It all sounds professional and sometimes almost abstract. But Human Experience can also simply be this: a man on a sidewalk, a sandwich, twenty euros, a question about someone's children. A mother who no longer knows that you are her son, but who still recognizes something in your face that makes her smile.
We can investigate brain activity, measure auditory thresholds, and model cognitive processes. We must continue to do so. But ultimately, a complaint is not experienced through an audiogram, and a brain does not suffer independently of the person in which that brain resides.
Suffering is lived by a human being.
And that same person can simultaneously love, hope, connect, mourn, choose, and experience meaning.
This also brings me back to ACT and to a metaphor I often use: the glass.
I regularly tell people that it may not be necessary to get all the pain out of the glass of life. Grief, fear, uncertainty, and loss are sometimes part of a life we hold dear. When we spend all our energy removing them, our life ultimately becomes smaller and smaller. Perhaps that is why we should not always try to empty the glass, but learn to make it bigger.
I still believe that.
However, I understand better now that there is a second side to that metaphor.
A larger glass does not mean that we must continue to add unlimited responsibilities, worries, expectations, and obligations. Psychological flexibility does not mean that a person must become endlessly flexible so that he can bear ever-increasing burdens.
I cannot change some pain. I cannot solve my mother's dementia. I cannot make my parents younger. I cannot remove uncertainty from my life. There, the glass can become bigger.
But other things might well change. Responsibilities can be redistributed. Boundaries may become clearer. Expectations can be adjusted. Some obligations may disappear. Something that worked well twenty years does not necessarily still fit today's life.
Perhaps sometimes no more capacity is needed.
Perhaps less tax is needed.
That, too, is psychological flexibility. Not only making room for what we cannot change, but being willing to move where change is possible. Not out of avoidance, but based on the question of whether the way we live still aligns with what is truly important.
I already knew that thought.
However, knowing is different from experiencing.
And so, for me, The Hearing Triptych suddenly turns out to be not just a way to understand tinnitus. It is almost starting to become a mirror.
My body reacts. My brain constantly tries to predict, protect, and find solutions. And surrounding this is a human life in which my parents are growing older, my mother is slowly changing, my relationship deserves attention, work is meaningful but also demands boundaries, art nourishes me, and meanwhile, my mind would prefer to know exactly today what my life should look like tomorrow.
Physics.
Brain.
Human Experience
No single panel tells the whole story.
That applies to the people who enter my consulting room.
And apparently, it applies to me as well.
Perhaps that is the most important lesson I am currently drawing from my own triptych. Helping a person recover is different from repairing a symptom. Sometimes recovery does not mean returning to exactly the life you had before. Perhaps it begins precisely with re-examining what you want to preserve, what can be reduced, and what needs to be given space again.
I don't know yet exactly where that will end up for me. That is uncomfortable for someone who would have preferred to find the answer yesterday.
Perhaps that answer doesn't need to be available yet.
A tree does not become stronger by pulling on its branches. It needs water, light, rest, and space. Meanwhile, underground, its roots slowly seek a new path, largely invisible to the outside world.
Maybe that is enough for now.
Not harder, not bigger, and not more.
First, carrots again.
And from there, see in which direction life wants to grow again.
Only the light can silence the darkness.
Perhaps that sentence means something different to me now than when I once wrote it down. Not that I have to try to dispel the darkness everywhere around me.
Maybe I should just let that light fall on myself every now and then.
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