You may have a partner or family member who regularly complains about the loud, rattling noise coming from your side of the bed, yet you rarely, if ever, hear it yourself. This common nightly event, known as snoring, creates a paradox: a sound loud enough to disrupt a household is seemingly silent to the person producing it. The reason you remain unaware of your own snoring lies in a combination of the sound’s physical transmission pathway and the filtering mechanisms of your sleeping brain.
The Physical Origin of Snoring Sounds
Snoring is the sound created by the vibration of soft tissues in the upper airway as air moves through a narrowed passage during sleep. When a person falls asleep, the muscles in the throat and neck naturally relax. This relaxation causes the soft palate, uvula, and pharyngeal walls to partially collapse inward, reducing the structural support of the airway.
As air is inhaled and exhaled through this restricted space, it causes the relaxed tissues to flutter, much like a flag flapping in the wind. The intensity of the snore is determined by the speed of the air and the degree of airway narrowing. A constricted passage forces the air to move faster, leading to a more turbulent flow and a louder sound that travels outside the body.
Auditory Processing and Sleep Stages
The primary reason you do not hear your own snore is a neurological process called sensory gating, which actively suppresses repetitive, non-threatening sensory input while you sleep. The brain is programmed to maintain sleep continuity by filtering out constant, predictable sounds, like a running fan or your own breathing. During the transition into sleep, the brain’s response to sounds decreases significantly.
This filtering is strong during the deeper, non-rapid eye movement (NREM) stages of sleep. In NREM sleep, the threshold for conscious awareness of sound increases dramatically, meaning a much louder noise is needed to cause an arousal. The brain classifies your own snore as self-generated and harmless, so it is gated out to protect your rest.
If a snorer does momentarily hear their own sound, it is typically during a very brief shift into a lighter sleep stage, such as N1 or N2, or just before waking. In these lighter stages, the sensory filter is less effective, allowing a fragment of the sound to briefly register. This momentary awareness reinforces the idea that the brain is actively assessing and suppressing the sound most of the time. The brain’s reduced attention to the auditory input prevents the sound from reaching conscious awareness.
The Difference Between Internal and External Sound
The sound of snoring reaches the ears of a sleeping partner through air conduction, which is the standard way sound travels from the source to the eardrum. However, the sound you produce internally travels to your own inner ear through a different pathway, known as bone conduction. In bone conduction, the sound vibrations travel directly through the tissues and bones of the head to the cochlea, bypassing the outer and middle ear structures entirely.
Because the snoring sound is generated inside the pharynx, the vibrations are transmitted through the skull to your inner ear. This bone-conducted sound is often muffled and distorted compared to the air-conducted sound that reaches your partner. The middle ear’s tiny bones, or ossicles, normally amplify airborne sound vibrations before they reach the inner ear.
The bone-conducted sound of your snore bypasses this natural amplification system, making it inherently less intense to your inner ear. This reduced intensity, combined with the brain’s sensory gating mechanism during sleep, means the sound fails to cross the threshold required for conscious perception.