Auditory Completion Invalidation: A Falsifiable Treatment Framework for Chronic Tinnitus Central Claim Chronic tinnitus may persist, in part, because the auditory system has adopted a rigid and maladaptive perceptual rule: *When reliable auditory evidence is reduced within a frequency channel, the missing information must be perceptually completed.* Under this framework, therapy should aim to invalidate the completion rule itself—not merely suppress, mask, distract from, or emotionally neutralize the resulting phantom tone. This formulation is more precise than attributing tinnitus simply to “missing frequencies.” Hearing loss is common among people who do not develop tinnitus, while severe tinnitus can occur without an obvious deficit on a conventional audiogram. Predictive-processing models instead suggest that spontaneous auditory activity may become consciously perceptible when the brain assigns it excessive precision, treats it as behaviorally significant, or adopts it as the most probable explanation for degraded sensory input. Auditory Completion Invalidation, or ACI, introduces a specific therapeutic objective: **Teach the auditory system that sensory absence is a legitimate and reliable perceptual state—not an error that must be resolved by generating sound.** 1. Conceptual Grounding: The Blind-Spot Model of Sensory Completion The physiological blind spot provides a useful demonstration of how central sensory systems respond to missing information. It shows that perception is not a passive transmission of raw physical data. The brain actively constructs a coherent model of the environment by combining incoming evidence with contextual expectations and prior knowledge. The Anatomy of Perceptual Filling-In Photoreceptors in the retina convert light into electrical signals. At the optic disc, however, retinal nerve fibers converge and exit the eye through the optic nerve. Because this region contains no photoreceptors, each eye has a genuine gap in its visual input, located approximately 12 to 15 degrees from the point of fixation in the temporal visual field. Despite this absence of retinal information, people do not normally perceive a permanent black hole, gray patch, or empty region. The sequence flows directly from raw environment to central construction: The visual scene produces a retinal input, which hits the optic disc where photoreceptors are completely absent. Faced with this missing sensory evidence, the brain does not simply label the area "data unavailable." Instead, it uses surrounding color, texture, contours, and motion to apply contextual predictions and cortical filling-in, outputting a contextually plausible estimate that is incorporated directly into conscious perception. The blind spot therefore establishes an important biological principle: When sensory evidence is incomplete, the nervous system may substitute an internally generated model for the missing input. Adaptive and Maladaptive Completion The comparison between the visual blind spot and chronic tinnitus reveals two very different outcomes of sensory completion derived from a shared underlying cascade. In adaptive visual completion, visual input is absent within a spatially bounded region at the optic disc. Surrounding visual information provides a rich and usually consistent basis for interpolation. The resulting contextual interpolation blends seamlessly into the scene, producing a complete percept that completely escapes conscious awareness. In maladaptive auditory completion, cochlear injury, synaptic loss, altered neural tuning, or other forms of degraded auditory evidence create an analogous—but not identical—gap within the auditory system. This can be understood as a *spectral blind spot*: a region in which bottom-up information has become unreliable, weakened, or ambiguous.