Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick and Robert.
Speaker 1: I'd like you to think about something, and that's what
Speaker 1: I'm here for. I want you to think about the
Speaker 1: idea of the substance of absence in our in our
Speaker 1: sensory experience of the world. So we all experience this
Speaker 1: in our lives where there is a stark disconnect between
Speaker 1: everything we know about physics and what are intuitions tell us.
Speaker 1: And one of the examples of this is that there
Speaker 1: is no such substance in physics as cold, right, Cold
Speaker 1: is just the absence of heat energy. And yet if
Speaker 1: you have an experience like mine, when you hold an
Speaker 1: ice cube in your hand, it doesn't just feel like
Speaker 1: heat is leaving your body. It certainly feels like you
Speaker 1: are meeting cold. You are meeting a substance of coldness
Speaker 1: that is an independent material reality in itself, not unlike
Speaker 1: how many people process sight as a beam coming out
Speaker 1: of their eyes, like they think about it in those terms,
Speaker 1: even though most of those people, I think are going
Speaker 1: to realize that that's not how vision works, but we
Speaker 1: can't help it interpret what's happening it as such. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's almost like people think of sight as an apprehending power.
Speaker 1: It's like you would reach out to pick something up.
Speaker 1: So in order to get visions, you must be reaching
Speaker 1: out with your eyes in some way to pull things in. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Also to mention light, there's no such substance in physics
Speaker 1: as darkness. Of course, darkness is just the absence of light.
Speaker 1: But when a cloud passes in front of the sun
Speaker 1: and it casts a shadow over the earth, and you
Speaker 1: get that little shiver when that happens, it is hard
Speaker 1: not to think of that shadow, the darkness, as a
Speaker 1: substance unto itself, at least if you're like me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean unless an entity is actually stepping out of
Speaker 1: the negative material plane, right, if there's actual actually a
Speaker 1: denizen of the shadow realm uh, breaching your immediate universe. Well,
Speaker 1: of course I speak not of beings of darkness, because
Speaker 1: merely to speak of them is to summon them, and
Speaker 1: now we should be watching our backs. But another substance
Speaker 1: like this is the substance of silence. Right, So silence
Speaker 1: is not a thing, it's merely the absence of the
Speaker 1: vibrational pressure waves of energy that we call sound. But
Speaker 1: in psychological terms, I wonder it is silence a substance
Speaker 1: in the same way as cold and darker to me.
Speaker 1: And if it is, I think we may have come
Speaker 1: across some interesting biological reasons for feeling this way. So Robert,
Speaker 1: back in, you and Julie did an episode of this
Speaker 1: show where you talked about the quietest place in the
Speaker 1: entire world. And I went back and listened to the episode,
Speaker 1: and at this time, Uh, the quietest place in the
Speaker 1: world was a type of room known as an an
Speaker 1: a co wick chamber, meaning a chamber that's echo free
Speaker 1: no echoes, at a facility in Minneapolis, Minnesota called or
Speaker 1: Field Laboratories. You remember doing this episode. I assume no
Speaker 1: one has wiped your memory. It's amazing how much I
Speaker 1: forget about some some old episodes. Um, but I do
Speaker 1: remember this one. Yes, Okay, So if you haven't seen it,
Speaker 1: you should google pictures of this lab facility you out
Speaker 1: there listening. According to Atlas Obscura, it's actually in the
Speaker 1: same building where Bob Dylan recorded Blood on the Tracks,
Speaker 1: not the same room, but the same building. Uh, and
Speaker 1: so this room is used to test appliances and equipment
Speaker 1: for sound production under very very sensitive conditions by creating
Speaker 1: the most the quietest environment we could imagine. And to
Speaker 1: achieve these conditions, the room has been built in a
Speaker 1: very weird way. So it's got double layered steel and
Speaker 1: foot thick concrete walls. It's got this vault type door,
Speaker 1: and then on the walls from floor to see ling,
Speaker 1: they are covered with fiberglass acoustic wedges, which are these
Speaker 1: fuzzy looking three foot long axe blades that stab out
Speaker 1: into the room from the walls. And it looks like
Speaker 1: at any moment the trap is going to spring and
Speaker 1: the walls will begin closing in and these wedges are
Speaker 1: going to become interlocking teeth, you know, to grind your
Speaker 1: bones between them. But as far as we know, it
Speaker 1: is not a trap. People have been to the room
Speaker 1: and survived, uh, though maybe not unscathed. So it's just
Speaker 1: a room with a very powerful thirst for absorbing sound.
Speaker 1: And according to the Guinness Book of World Records account
Speaker 1: the ambient sound levels inside it are about negative thirteen
Speaker 1: decibels or d b a actually, which is just an
Speaker 1: adjusted version of decibel measurement we will horrify the audio
Speaker 1: engineers and just use decibels for simplicity, say going forward.
Speaker 1: But so when you when you hear something like negative
Speaker 1: thirteen decibels, that might sound kind of weird, right, How
Speaker 1: how could you have negative sound, especially since you you
Speaker 1: look at various lists and near total silence is zero
Speaker 1: A whispers fifteen, so it's like a negative whisper. How
Speaker 1: is that possible? Well, zero decipels actually doesn't mean no sound.
Speaker 1: Zero decibels is just taken to be the threshold of
Speaker 1: normal human hearing and birth your best hearing. Infancy hearing
Speaker 1: people can usually detect sounds above zero decibels. Below zero decibels,
Speaker 1: you know, too bad a very human scale. It's a
Speaker 1: scale based on human perception of sound, not sound is
Speaker 1: some sort of um, concrete thing outside of human experience exactly.
Speaker 1: And so going into this space of negative decibels is
Speaker 1: like going into the underverse. It puts you in a
Speaker 1: very bizarre state of mind. People who have gone here
Speaker 1: report that they have a hard time staying in the
Speaker 1: room too long. They used to have this thing. All
Speaker 1: the articles about it mentioned this challenge that the owner
Speaker 1: seems very excited about. Where he would test to people
Speaker 1: to see how long they could stay in there. You
Speaker 1: seem to get some kind of sadistic pleasure out of it.
Speaker 1: But in the under verse with the necromongers from Chronicles
Speaker 1: of Riddick, I do appreciate a good Chronicles of Riddick
Speaker 1: reference to. Actually, I've never seen chronically that's the under
Speaker 1: verse is a big deal in that. Oh, the under
Speaker 1: verse is bigger than than Riddick. Oh well, I don't know,
Speaker 1: ridd it's pretty big. If you've seen his arms, he's
Speaker 1: very very big. I guess you'll. You'll have to show
Speaker 1: it to me someday. But so anyway, supposedly, inside this
Speaker 1: antichote chamber, what happens is people become just hyper aware
Speaker 1: of the sounds produced by their own bodies. You are,
Speaker 1: you start to hear the thump of your own heart,
Speaker 1: and hear the kind of squelching of your digestive system,
Speaker 1: and you hear this hissing and rustling which is your
Speaker 1: own respiration. And media reports also claim that people become dizzy, disoriented,
Speaker 1: sometimes kind of panicky, which suggests that our hearing is
Speaker 1: in some way tied to our body orientation and movement. Right,
Speaker 1: you may have read these stories about blind people using
Speaker 1: forms of echolocation to hear where they are in a room.
Speaker 1: This kind of suggests that even people with normal senses,
Speaker 1: all of their senses functioning normally, might still use some
Speaker 1: kind of echolocation and basic body orientation. My favorite detail
Speaker 1: I heard was I read one story in The Guardian
Speaker 1: about a man who went into this room and he
Speaker 1: claimed that after his ears adjusted, he could hear his
Speaker 1: own scalp moving over his skull when he changed facial expressions.
Speaker 1: You know, one of the important things to keep in
Speaker 1: mind about all this too, is that, of course it
Speaker 1: goes without saying that humans have evolved to thrive in
Speaker 1: a certain sort of environment and with a certain amount
Speaker 1: of sound in their immediate environment. So we're we have
Speaker 1: We did not evolve to to live in in quiet chambers.
Speaker 1: We evolved to live in the world, and so when
Speaker 1: we are deprived of almost like the oxygen of sound,
Speaker 1: so much we have to it's almost like the mind
Speaker 1: has to gulp in more of it. If it doesn't
Speaker 1: have something to chew on, it will start chewing on itself,
Speaker 1: which is certainly a trend that occurs time and time
Speaker 1: again in any kind of experiment looking into sensory deprivation,
Speaker 1: and we are discussing, you know, one major area of
Speaker 1: sensory deprivation here. And this is another thing that gets
Speaker 1: mentioned in in context with these anteco chambers is that
Speaker 1: you might go into there and experience auditory hallucinations just
Speaker 1: because of that sensory deprivation element. But anyway, since that
Speaker 1: podcast that you and Julie recorded, there's a new kid
Speaker 1: in town. Microsoft has built a silent mind flare chamber,
Speaker 1: even more psychedelically quiet than the one at oar Field Labs.
Speaker 1: And much like the other facility, this one is used
Speaker 1: for sort of audio and device testing in very sensitive conditions.
Speaker 1: But it's located at Microsoft's Audio lab in Redmond, Washington,
Speaker 1: and according to Business Wire, Microsoft contracted a company called
Speaker 1: Echo Noise Control Technology I think actually the same company
Speaker 1: that built the oar Field room UH to build this
Speaker 1: new dungeon of lost whisperhaps for them, and it was
Speaker 1: completed in July. But compared to or fields negative thirteen decibles,
Speaker 1: this room gets as quiet as negative twenty point six decibles.
Speaker 1: And this is close to about as quiet as a
Speaker 1: room filled with atmosphere can possibly be. So since sound
Speaker 1: is caused by mechanical pressure waves in a medium such
Speaker 1: as air or water. There is no sound at all
Speaker 1: in a vacuum. If you were to go into the
Speaker 1: vacuum of space, you wouldn't hear anything. But in a
Speaker 1: room filled just screams exactly. But in a room filled
Speaker 1: with normal atmosphere, negative twenty three decibles is about as
Speaker 1: quiet as things can get, because that's the sound level
Speaker 1: of what's known as Brownian motion, which is the random
Speaker 1: movement of air particles rustling against one another. I would
Speaker 1: love to hear what that sounds like. I think Brownian
Speaker 1: motion of air particles. There's actually an email album, yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: like a late seventies a perfect companion to metal machine music. Yea. Anyway,
Speaker 1: so I started thinking about this room and about how
Speaker 1: there are actually plenty of god beings and monsters from
Speaker 1: the history of human imagination who have found themselves in
Speaker 1: a dire quest for a place like this room. I
Speaker 1: think that the quest for peace and quiet is it's
Speaker 1: we think of it as something of the modern age, right,
Speaker 1: you live in the city, or there's the traffic horns,
Speaker 1: honking people, screaming people I don't know, arguing about Pokemon
Speaker 1: go and about whether adults should play it or not
Speaker 1: outside your window at all hours of the night. And
Speaker 1: we come to associate this feeling of of this noisy
Speaker 1: cacaphony with modernity. But but this feeling goes way back.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean, really, humans haven't changed that much,
Speaker 1: not so much that they've stopped being annoying and obnoxious
Speaker 1: and loud. We've we've had a loud talkers among us.
Speaker 1: We've had we've had individuals who cannot wake up silently.
Speaker 1: Uh since time out of mind. Though, then again, I
Speaker 1: do think it's kind of interesting. We're going to mention
Speaker 1: a few of these that the quest for silence, the
Speaker 1: desire for peace and quiet, is often associated with villains,
Speaker 1: not heroes. Well you do see, Yeah, the I mean,
Speaker 1: I think I think it falls on both sides. I
Speaker 1: guess the heroes that are seeking silence, they tend to
Speaker 1: want to share that path to silence with others. So
Speaker 1: it's more about, hey, everybody, let me show you the
Speaker 1: way to the silence. Let me show you a way
Speaker 1: of silence that will better your life, whereas the monsters
Speaker 1: are a little more selfish. Well, one great example of
Speaker 1: this is the enemy a leash the creation myth of
Speaker 1: ancient Mesopotamia, which you see in ancient Sumerian and Babylonian texts.
Speaker 1: Originally at Sumerian focused on the god in Leal. Later
Speaker 1: the Babylonian version is altered to glorify the Babylonian god
Speaker 1: mar Duke. But the story is pretty much that the
Speaker 1: gods Apsu and Tiamat freshwater and salt water personified. They
Speaker 1: they sort of live in this primordial chaos and they
Speaker 1: create a younger generation of gods who just make a
Speaker 1: great rucus. They cause disorder, irritating noise, and Opsu, in
Speaker 1: reaction to this, plots to destroy his creations in order
Speaker 1: to get some peace and quiet. Quote, by day I
Speaker 1: cannot rest, by night, I cannot lie down in peace,
Speaker 1: but I will destroy their way. Let there be lamentation,
Speaker 1: and let us lie down again in peace. Oh nice. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, later a hero has to come and fight
Speaker 1: these beings. Actually, so Opsu gets destroyed, and then Tiamatt
Speaker 1: his his sort of companion, his female counterpart becomes a
Speaker 1: monster that has to be fought. But so yeah, not
Speaker 1: the heroes of the piece here, But they want some
Speaker 1: peace and quiet, that all all these new created beings
Speaker 1: are just too loud and irritating. It's in it always
Speaker 1: the way. The youth are loud, and they need to
Speaker 1: they need to pipe down because those old people are
Speaker 1: trying to get some sleep. I wonder if that is
Speaker 1: what's behind the idea of Grendel in Beowolf, because he
Speaker 1: he quite famously is not a fan of the noise,
Speaker 1: not a fan of the partying that's coming from the
Speaker 1: mead hall across the way, right. So what's what's the
Speaker 1: basic story of Grendel and Beowulf. It's Beowulf comes to
Speaker 1: Rathgar's mead Hall of hero right in the land of
Speaker 1: the Dane men, and they they party in the hall
Speaker 1: and have their big feasts, and somewhere nearby there's this
Speaker 1: monster called Grendel. Not actually described physically very much. Yeah,
Speaker 1: virtually no physical descriptions um, which means basically any interpretation
Speaker 1: you have is valid. I did read some great translations
Speaker 1: of the description. What they do say about him the
Speaker 1: march Stepper, famous who dwelt in the more fins, the
Speaker 1: marsh and the fast nous, a fiend in hell. This
Speaker 1: ghastly demon was named Grendel, infamous stalker of the marches
Speaker 1: who held the Moor's finn and desolate stronghold, the land
Speaker 1: of the marsh Monsters. Nice. I always liked that the
Speaker 1: way John Gardner described him in his novel A Grendel,
Speaker 1: which is one of my my favorites. He described him
Speaker 1: his quote a shadow shooter, earth rim roamer, walker of
Speaker 1: the world's weird wall. Oh, that's so great, and that
Speaker 1: captures this is a feature of the Anglo Saxon poetry,
Speaker 1: is the alliteration there where you hear the same words
Speaker 1: starting consonants used over and over, and Gardner captures that
Speaker 1: very well. But anyway, so in the story, of course,
Speaker 1: Beowulf has to go and kill Grendel, and the reason
Speaker 1: he does that is because he's a jerk, basically he is.
Speaker 1: But also it's because Grendel comes into Rothgar's mead hall
Speaker 1: and and messes him up. He comes in and kills
Speaker 1: He does kill a lot of a lot of people
Speaker 1: in the uh in the Damon's the sense. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: why does he come into the meat hall and kill
Speaker 1: the Dane men? Well, there are a couple of ways
Speaker 1: you could read this, but the basic way is the
Speaker 1: way it's described in the poem. It's kind of vague,
Speaker 1: but it seems like he's annoyed by the noise they're making.
Speaker 1: So one translation reads quote then the bold spirit impatiently
Speaker 1: endured dreary time, He who dwelt in darkness. He that
Speaker 1: every day heard noise of revelry loud in the hall.
Speaker 1: There was the harmony of the harp, the sweet song
Speaker 1: of the poet. Uh, and he doesn't like this noise. Now,
Speaker 1: it's unclear to me, and I think they're actually differing
Speaker 1: opinions on this. Whether the text means that Grendel was
Speaker 1: actually jealous of the Danes, you know, friendship and happiness,
Speaker 1: their their camaraderie and the party, or merely that he
Speaker 1: just couldn't stand the noise. The sound of it bothered him.
Speaker 1: But is it the same question we ask ourselves when
Speaker 1: whenever we're annoyed by a neighbor having a loud party?
Speaker 1: Am I annoyed because they are loud and I want
Speaker 1: to sleep right now? Where am I loud because I
Speaker 1: was not invited? Or I am not invited to parties
Speaker 1: like this anymore? That that line of questioning, well, it
Speaker 1: might be hard to tell the difference. Yeah, Robert, you
Speaker 1: made a fascinating observation I had never considered before. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: tell me tell me about Oh well, I've I read
Speaker 1: a lot of Dr SEUs folks these days, and so
Speaker 1: anytime I read or if we end up viewing The Grinch,
Speaker 1: Who's still Christmas, the comparisons are are pretty uh, are
Speaker 1: pretty obvious, because in Grendel you have a monster that
Speaker 1: lives out in the boonies who comes into the center
Speaker 1: of civilization and unleash's havoc when there is too much noise,
Speaker 1: and the same thing happens with the Grinch. The Grinch
Speaker 1: hates the noise of the Christmas season, even the g
Speaker 1: r is there. Yea, it seems like it's got to
Speaker 1: be intentional, right, Oh, the noise, noise, noise, noise, noise.
Speaker 1: There's one thing I hate all the noise, noise, noise, noise.
Speaker 1: It's the who's in Whoville are like the Dane men
Speaker 1: and hero Yeah, except instead of uh, you know, coming
Speaker 1: in and killing who's, he just was gonna he's gonna,
Speaker 1: uh you know, he's gonna surgically remove the cause of
Speaker 1: their joy, uh, and the joy being the cause of
Speaker 1: their noise. But of course that backfires and he has
Speaker 1: to remove Christmas. But then his heart grew three sizes
Speaker 1: that day. Yeah, they're a number of anatomical complications in
Speaker 1: the comparison, but it doesn't happen to Grendel. Grendel, I
Speaker 1: believe his head shrinks many sizes that day. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: well I'm not sure he gets his head cut off. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Also of the arm, yeah, arm to the arm, the
Speaker 1: arm is cut off? First, is that a call going
Speaker 1: got cut off? Because I think blades don't quite cut him,
Speaker 1: like blades melt or something when they when they they
Speaker 1: hit his blood. Description, there's some descriptions that can be
Speaker 1: interpreted that either Grendel's blood is acidic and is eating
Speaker 1: through the blade or it is so hot that it
Speaker 1: is melting the blade. But Beowulf just rips off the
Speaker 1: arm and then Grendel runs away. Wow. So here we've
Speaker 1: got these monsters and god beings, uh, causing mayhem and
Speaker 1: havoc and trouble for the creatures that dwell under their
Speaker 1: level of power by trying to shut them up, just
Speaker 1: wanting silence. And and if we can only find a
Speaker 1: room for Grendel, if we could find an antechoic chamber,
Speaker 1: for him, this never would have happened. But I wondered
Speaker 1: if there are any straight up gods of silence. Well
Speaker 1: there is, um Hippocrates, the Greek god of silence, and
Speaker 1: he's thought to have evolved from a childhood variant of
Speaker 1: the Egyptian god Horace. But ultimately Hippocrates is really more
Speaker 1: about secrets than silence. So it's it's more about yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, occult knowledge in many interpretations, as opposed to
Speaker 1: just oh I need a nice meditative place to think.
Speaker 1: I knew there was a group of monsters in Doctor
Speaker 1: who called the Silence, but I looked at them up
Speaker 1: and found that their name is somewhat misleading. Oh what
Speaker 1: do they do? Uh? They engineer history and cause people
Speaker 1: to have mass forgettings of events and stuff. But as
Speaker 1: far as I know, they're not especially all that quiet. Uh, well,
Speaker 1: one one that is quiet. I have to confess, I'm
Speaker 1: not a doctor expert. I don't know that much. What
Speaker 1: did you ever watch Buffy? No? I actually didn't. Should
Speaker 1: It's a lot of fun. You know, you kind of
Speaker 1: have to plow through that first season, but but it's
Speaker 1: it's all it's all fun after that, As I recall
Speaker 1: but one episode in particular, one of the best episodes UH,
Speaker 1: is titled Hush, and it concerns a group of sort
Speaker 1: of fairy tale ghoulish creatures called the Gentleman, and they
Speaker 1: come to town to steal everyone's voices, leaving them unable
Speaker 1: to scream when they come around and cut everyone's hearts out.
Speaker 1: And then we finally learned that if you the reason
Speaker 1: here is because loud noises such as those caused by
Speaker 1: a screaming human, caused the creatures heads to explode. Now
Speaker 1: that's funny. You should mention it, because one thing we
Speaker 1: do know is that loud no noises can definitely cause
Speaker 1: injury and damage to live in creatures. Oh yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean there's a lot of data out there about about
Speaker 1: noise pollution. UM. You know various uh, various humans, I
Speaker 1: mean humans even, but also playing of non human animals. Uh.
Speaker 1: The distraction alone can put many prey animals at an
Speaker 1: increasing risk of predation. Uh. And the more pronounced effects
Speaker 1: are generally found in marine mammals such as whales and
Speaker 1: also in cephalopods. UH. The giant squid actually offers the
Speaker 1: clearest example of this. Yeah. In the in the early
Speaker 1: two thousand's low frequency sound pulse exercises that I believe
Speaker 1: we're being utilized by the oil industry. Um. It was
Speaker 1: like dynamite fishing for squid, right right, Yeah, essentially, so
Speaker 1: they're they're blasting out these uh, these low frequency pulses
Speaker 1: and then dead squid start up, start just popping up,
Speaker 1: and they seem to have extensive bodily damage. And uh
Speaker 1: when they looked closer, they found that like their mantles
Speaker 1: were reduced pulp, there was bruised muscles, lesions in their statusists,
Speaker 1: which are these fluid filled organs that rest behind the
Speaker 1: creatures eyes that helped them maintain their ballots and position.
Speaker 1: In a few years after this, Spanish marine biologists and
Speaker 1: gal Gara investigated this further and found that low frequency
Speaker 1: sound exposure intensities between a hundred fifty seven hundred seventy
Speaker 1: five decibels and frequency range which is very loud. Should say, Yeah,
Speaker 1: one of the things to drive home and throw some
Speaker 1: throughout some comparisons here in a bit is that, yeah, underwater, uh,
Speaker 1: sounds can really get up there. Some of our loudest
Speaker 1: noises on Earth they're occurring underwater. Um. But but anyway,
Speaker 1: in this experiment, found that that there was a great
Speaker 1: deal of UH statusist tissue damage, including the destruction of
Speaker 1: tiny inverted hair like sensory structures in the cells that
Speaker 1: helped the creatures maintain their balance. So this effectively crippled
Speaker 1: them and even the the the various salivods that they studied,
Speaker 1: the ones that survived the experiment exhibited in some cases
Speaker 1: visible holes in the tissues. So we're talking, you know,
Speaker 1: legitimate kind Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean the worst. If
Speaker 1: you're comparing places to be next to a bomb um,
Speaker 1: the water is far worse. Like if someone throw If
Speaker 1: you're at if your pool side and someone throws a grenade,
Speaker 1: two grenades into your vicinity, one in the water, one
Speaker 1: on the surface. Definitely stay on the surface, but also
Speaker 1: avoid pool parties where grenades are being thrown around. How
Speaker 1: do you keep getting invited to those I don't know? Um?
Speaker 1: Like when I when I when they stopped inviting me,
Speaker 1: And then I'm gonna I'm gonna feel bad. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: look back on and say, why why don't they invite
Speaker 1: me to these loud, noisy grenade parties? Uh? And I
Speaker 1: wish I could go to sleep now Robert right before
Speaker 1: we get back to the subject of silence. I know
Speaker 1: everybody wants to know how do you make a human
Speaker 1: head explode with sound? All right, so this is a
Speaker 1: pretty cool There was a popular science article by seth
Speaker 1: ET's horror at that came out a few years back,
Speaker 1: and he looked into this. Include but we'll make sure
Speaker 1: we include a link to this on the landing page
Speaker 1: for this episode, because it's worth checking out. But he
Speaker 1: ruled that yes, sufficiently powerful sound waves can make a
Speaker 1: human head explode, much like the the Gentleman on Buffy Um.
Speaker 1: Because uh infrasound is essentially a hell of a thing.
Speaker 1: So if you crank it up to eighteen point ninety
Speaker 1: eight hurts the same resonance of the human eye, and
Speaker 1: the resulting distortions can make you see weird ghostly shapes. However,
Speaker 1: if you crank it up to two hundred and forty decibels,
Speaker 1: you can get the skull to resonate destructively. Especially it's
Speaker 1: especially the case if you're using a debt like a
Speaker 1: cadaver head. But but this could conceivably be the case
Speaker 1: with a living head as well. To put that in perspective,
Speaker 1: low frequency sonar can reach two hundred and thirty five decibels,
Speaker 1: and the nineteen o eight Tunguska event, you know, of
Speaker 1: course they and you earth object colliding with the Earth.
Speaker 1: It's heard around the world, perhaps the loudest single event
Speaker 1: in modern history, and it probably hit three hundred to
Speaker 1: three so loud stuff. So we've never seen anybody's head
Speaker 1: explode from sound. No And I think the way that,
Speaker 1: the way that Horowitz explained it is that if you
Speaker 1: were setting there, you if you had the technology to
Speaker 1: do it, you would still get bored, and you just
Speaker 1: probably want to brain the person in the head with
Speaker 1: the device you're using. Like it's it's not a bit.
Speaker 1: There are far better ways to make a head explode
Speaker 1: than depending on sound. Okay. So we've been talking about
Speaker 1: the idea of silence as a substance and where you
Speaker 1: can find it. And one piece that I came across
Speaker 1: that I thought was pretty interesting was a short article
Speaker 1: in High Country News, which is a very good magazine
Speaker 1: focusing on nature in the American West, uh and it
Speaker 1: was about places of quiet in the American wilderness. Now,
Speaker 1: we often think about human activity is the prime very
Speaker 1: purveyor of noise, which it usually is. But leaving the
Speaker 1: city doesn't always mean heading to a place of quiet.
Speaker 1: Of course. I think about William Butler Yates Lake Isle
Speaker 1: of innist Free. He wants to get away from the
Speaker 1: bustle of the city. But where he's going isn't going
Speaker 1: to be silent, right, because he's going to live in
Speaker 1: the b loud glade. What a great term. But anyway,
Speaker 1: you know nature, you hear the nature sounds, the crickets,
Speaker 1: the wind, wrestling the leaves. But even in nature, some
Speaker 1: places are louder than others. So at uh that they
Speaker 1: talked about Idaho's City of Rocks National Reserve. It's going
Speaker 1: to be very quiet, but you'll still probably hear the
Speaker 1: faint sounds of running water and wrestling leaves. Um and
Speaker 1: it can get quieter. One example is Colorado's Great Sand
Speaker 1: Dunes National Park, which is very quiet. According to research
Speaker 1: by the National Park Service, It's almost as quiet as
Speaker 1: it was before the European colonization of America. But like
Speaker 1: the Antichoic Chamber, this level of silence sort of highlights
Speaker 1: an underlying lack of islands. You go into the chamber
Speaker 1: and you hear your heartbeat, your scalp moving all of
Speaker 1: that creepy stuff. You apparently go to Great Sand Dunes
Speaker 1: National Park and they say that you hear other sounds
Speaker 1: from very far away, for example, the sounds of the
Speaker 1: Denver International Airport. I did a quick Google Maps check
Speaker 1: to see how far away that is, and it's about
Speaker 1: two hundred and fifty miles or a four hour drive.
Speaker 1: So if this is true, you're you're hearing planes taking
Speaker 1: off from two fifty miles away. That's just crazy. They
Speaker 1: also put together, the National Park Service put together a
Speaker 1: map of America with color coding for different levels of noise,
Speaker 1: and so they have these blue regions where it's very quiet,
Speaker 1: in these yellow regions where it's allowed. One thing I
Speaker 1: noticed is that there's a very sharp east west divide.
Speaker 1: The west is much quieter than the east, and I
Speaker 1: would say from experience, I think that's right. Even being
Speaker 1: in the wilderness, if you get out of the City's
Speaker 1: when I noticed. Going to the wilderness in the east,
Speaker 1: it's I don't know, you hear bugs, and you hear wind,
Speaker 1: rustling leaves and stuff like that. Probably the quietest place
Speaker 1: I can ever remember being was the desert in southwest Texas.
Speaker 1: At Big Ben National Park where there was this one
Speaker 1: day where I was riding around in a car with
Speaker 1: my wife Rachel and her cousin Marie, and one day
Speaker 1: we we parked and I went off by myself to
Speaker 1: hike up a short little trail, and by myself. At
Speaker 1: the top of this trail, I can remember just hearing nothing.
Speaker 1: I couldn't hear any water, any insects, any birds, any
Speaker 1: wind or leaves. The air was very still. I just
Speaker 1: heard this kind of vague whir of things, very distant.
Speaker 1: And it's one of the bluest places on the map. Actually, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's impressive to look one of these maps.
Speaker 1: You know where not to move if you are a
Speaker 1: Grendel or a granch So like obviously, don't go virtually
Speaker 1: where in New England, stay out of the Midwest. Don't
Speaker 1: go to Florida. Even the sparsely populated Midwest. It looks
Speaker 1: like they're there are a lot of places that are
Speaker 1: kind of yellow, and I wonder if that's because of
Speaker 1: it kind of flat landscape and a lot of highways.
Speaker 1: You can hear traffic from very far away. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: pretty much have to go to the desert okay, but
Speaker 1: I think we should actually talk about some medical research
Speaker 1: with reference to silence and noise. Now everybody knows, of course,
Speaker 1: that noise can be really irritating, but I think we
Speaker 1: don't often realize the extent to which noise takes a
Speaker 1: measurable toll on human on human health, and some people
Speaker 1: have actually tried to measure this. For example, I found
Speaker 1: oneten study in the Lancet that said, quote, Observational and
Speaker 1: experimental studies have shown that noise exposure leads to annoyance,
Speaker 1: disturbed sleep, and causes daytime sleepiness, affects patient outcomes and
Speaker 1: staff performance in hospitals, increases the occurrence of hypertension and
Speaker 1: cardiovascular disease, and impairs cognitive performance in school children. Now,
Speaker 1: if all these things were being caused by some food
Speaker 1: additive or something, we would be freaking out. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: know there. I believe that the childhood front there there
Speaker 1: have been studies in recent years that have looked into
Speaker 1: like the role background music plays and how that can
Speaker 1: actually that has a can have a detrimental effect on
Speaker 1: on On one hand, I'm just communicating with the kid
Speaker 1: and like getting their attention because even though you're cool,
Speaker 1: with some ambient music playing in the background, and that
Speaker 1: enhances your experiences of the scenario. It can be actually
Speaker 1: kind of distracting for them. And I believe that it
Speaker 1: occasionally even has been shown to to bleed over into
Speaker 1: language acquisition to some degree. I don't have the research
Speaker 1: in front of me right now, but it's interesting. But
Speaker 1: even but even then, the noise that we take for granted,
Speaker 1: the stuff that's not noise, the stuff that we the
Speaker 1: adults put on to cancel out the noise, can itself, um,
Speaker 1: you know, have a noisome effect. Yeah, And so when
Speaker 1: you're exposed to a noise, of course, this activates a
Speaker 1: stress response in the brain and goes to the amygdala,
Speaker 1: and that triggers there is the release of stress hormones
Speaker 1: like cortisol. And of course these hormones serve a purpose
Speaker 1: in nature, right if you you've got you've got to
Speaker 1: get ready for a fight, or you've got to be
Speaker 1: able to run. But if you've just got continuously elevated
Speaker 1: levels of stress hormone being triggered by noises that have
Speaker 1: no relevance to you whatsoever, that's not good for your health.
Speaker 1: And there's no good reason for it. Yeah, so we're
Speaker 1: talking like horns, honking um, things out of the ordinary,
Speaker 1: things that your mind hasn't had a chance to sort
Speaker 1: of program into the normal rate of sounds. Jackhammers on
Speaker 1: the floor above you in the office. Yeah, it's weird
Speaker 1: to think about this because I actually live next to
Speaker 1: train tracks and I virtually never hear Like I hear
Speaker 1: them all the time, but I almost never register them, uh,
Speaker 1: And they never interfere with my in my sleep or anything,
Speaker 1: unless there's a sound that that happens that's out of
Speaker 1: the ordinary, some sort of occasionally there's like this huge
Speaker 1: shuddering um stop to a train it's making its way through.
Speaker 1: But other than that, I legitimately haven't really heard the
Speaker 1: train in a distractive manner since the day I moved
Speaker 1: into the house. Well, there's one thing I would say
Speaker 1: is that you might not even be aware of the
Speaker 1: extent to which it is disturbing your sleep, because noise
Speaker 1: disturbance of sleep is a major factor in these health outcomes.
Speaker 1: In fact, in two thousand eleven, the World Health Organization
Speaker 1: they put together this big report and they were collecting
Speaker 1: evidence on the public health risks posed by noise in
Speaker 1: European Union member states, and they actually put numbers on it.
Speaker 1: They tried to take what we know and make some
Speaker 1: estimates of what the total effects are. And of course
Speaker 1: what they were calculating this in was something called dailies
Speaker 1: or disability adjusted life here. So how many healthy years
Speaker 1: is this issue taking off of people's lives? You can
Speaker 1: measure a lot of negative health UH factors that way,
Speaker 1: and they said, quote, with conservative assumptions applied to the
Speaker 1: calculation methods, it's estimated that UH daily is lost from
Speaker 1: environmental noise are sixty one thousand years for heart disease,
Speaker 1: forty five thousand years for cognitive impairment of children, nine
Speaker 1: hundred and three thousand years for sleep disturbance, twenty two
Speaker 1: thousand years for tenadis six hundred and fifty four thousand
Speaker 1: years for annoyance. In the European Union member states, the
Speaker 1: results indicate that at least one million healthy life years
Speaker 1: are lost every year from traffic related noise in the
Speaker 1: western part of Europe. Well, that's a good thing. I
Speaker 1: turned on that white noise in the evening. That does
Speaker 1: bring something up I want to keep thinking about throughout
Speaker 1: this episode. Is white noise the same as silence, Like,
Speaker 1: what really is silence? If we've established this principle where
Speaker 1: you go into the antichotic chamber and there's silence, and
Speaker 1: that just means that you notice your heartbeat, and you
Speaker 1: notice the you know, the creepy scalp. You go to
Speaker 1: a national park in Colorado and you notice planes taking
Speaker 1: off hundreds of miles away. You're always digging deeper into
Speaker 1: the background sound palette. And so if that's the case,
Speaker 1: what is silence? Is there actually such an experience as silence? Well,
Speaker 1: as far as white noise machines go, I feel like
Speaker 1: in a way that the use of colors is kind
Speaker 1: of telling. Now specifically, I use a brown noise. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's my favorite setting. It's a good one. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: it's hard not to think of it in terms of
Speaker 1: of of say wall that was once white. So like,
Speaker 1: all right, it's got some smears on it, it's got
Speaker 1: some scuffs. I could try and clean it down, I
Speaker 1: could try and go back to that that that white level.
Speaker 1: I could try and subscribe everything away and get to
Speaker 1: some level of silence. But I'm better off just putting
Speaker 1: up a wall of sound and just make just painting
Speaker 1: the wall brown. Sorry, I'm mixing my metaphors here, but
Speaker 1: I don't know. I see what you're saying. A new
Speaker 1: um and a new seamless sound. Uh, you know, base
Speaker 1: level of noise that has no no variety. They're not
Speaker 1: going to be any sudden Uh you know, goblin cackles
Speaker 1: or anything. Yeah, quiet, predictable sound you can tune out
Speaker 1: and register is silence. Real silence is hard to tune
Speaker 1: out because you're constantly hearing tiny variations. Yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: want to hear all the little noises that mightn't happen
Speaker 1: during the night. I don't want to. I certainly don't
Speaker 1: want to hear anything the cats up to. So I
Speaker 1: would rather just just go ahead and put up this
Speaker 1: wall of sound you don't want to hear. Your kind
Speaker 1: of research on how to take your soul, it's going
Speaker 1: through those books of the occult you got. You know,
Speaker 1: you shouldn't have bought those, I know, especially the ones
Speaker 1: written in cat So Robert. One of the things that
Speaker 1: actually inspired me to do this episode was it was
Speaker 1: an article I read from Nautilus that was a July
Speaker 1: piece in Nautilus by Daniel A. Gross called this is
Speaker 1: your Brain on silence and This actually turned me onto
Speaker 1: a few more avenues of of inquiry that I want
Speaker 1: to talk about now. So in Gross's piece he mentions
Speaker 1: a few studies, and one of them is this two
Speaker 1: thousand six study in the journal Heart by a scientist
Speaker 1: named Luke Luciano Bernardi and colleagues. And it's called Cardiovascular,
Speaker 1: cerebro vascular and Respiratory changes induced by different types of
Speaker 1: music in musicians and non musicians. The importance of silence
Speaker 1: long name, But the interesting takeaway from this is that
Speaker 1: they were intending to study physiological effects of different types
Speaker 1: of music. This sounds like pretty standard research, right. So
Speaker 1: they hook you up to some machines and they want
Speaker 1: to play I don't know exactly what different music they played,
Speaker 1: probably some probably some metal, probably some classical. They played
Speaker 1: exciting music, arousing music, relaxing music, and they measured things
Speaker 1: about your body respirations, is stelic blood pressure, circulation in
Speaker 1: the brain, and they were trying to figure out, you know,
Speaker 1: do different types of music change these things? Now, of
Speaker 1: course they did. Different types of music did indeed lead
Speaker 1: to different states of arousal and cause physiological changes. But
Speaker 1: Bernardi and colleagues found that the most drastic changes and
Speaker 1: the most interesting changes happened when random two minute intervals
Speaker 1: of silence were introduced as a control to the tests.
Speaker 1: So these periods of silence had a physiologically measurable effect
Speaker 1: of calming and relaxation, more so than the relaxing, calming
Speaker 1: music that they were attempting to test. So this is
Speaker 1: kind of like if you went to a fancy restaurant
Speaker 1: or a wine tasting and the best part of your
Speaker 1: experience was the palate cleanser between courses, you know, the
Speaker 1: crackers or the sorbet or whatever. Is that that actually
Speaker 1: does more for you than anything else. It's like that
Speaker 1: wonderful scene in Putti tang Um Yes, which which I
Speaker 1: always have enjoyed as I think it's I think it's
Speaker 1: a fine movie. It's a great science fiction film. But
Speaker 1: there's a scene where we're Putty tang the the the
Speaker 1: the title character, who is himself an accomplished musician and
Speaker 1: just sort of cultural phenomenon um. He goes around winner. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's all around Winner. He goes in and he's gonna
Speaker 1: cut this new track. He's gonna drop this new track,
Speaker 1: and he gets the the sound engineer to just bring
Speaker 1: all the levels down, and he passionately performs a track
Speaker 1: of pure silence and and it becomes a sensation. And
Speaker 1: I think it's kind of a beautiful idea that it's
Speaker 1: like in this in in an in an age where
Speaker 1: like it's all about like the noise that the music,
Speaker 1: the constant music on top of all book sounds around us.
Speaker 1: That an actual silence, some force meditation it maybe even
Speaker 1: like essentially a two minute interval of silence enforced on
Speaker 1: everyone would have a profound impact. Well, yeah, it's Putti
Speaker 1: Tang spin on the the original work of the composer
Speaker 1: John Cage, Right, So John Cage would do these experimental
Speaker 1: music things where you know, it might be just like
Speaker 1: random turned on radios or complete silence or something like that.
Speaker 1: And it's it's easy to make jokes about that. You know,
Speaker 1: you go to a classical music concert and sit there
Speaker 1: while a pianist sits in front of a piano and
Speaker 1: she doesn't play anything. That that's funny, but it's also yeah,
Speaker 1: I can see the artistic merit in that causing people
Speaker 1: to notice other sounds in the room, to notice what
Speaker 1: the experience of listening is like by not having anything
Speaker 1: to listen to. But again it's also easy to make
Speaker 1: fun of. But another interesting fact here about the study,
Speaker 1: so found these periods of silence more relaxing than the
Speaker 1: relaxing music. The relaxing effect of the silence was more
Speaker 1: pronounced in these short intervals between music than it was
Speaker 1: in a long period of silence before the test started. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, the most profound effect of silence seemed
Speaker 1: to be when it occurred in contrast, And this is
Speaker 1: a quote from Gross's article that that is quoting Bernardi
Speaker 1: that the author of the study gives to the author
Speaker 1: of the article quote, perhaps the arousal is something that
Speaker 1: concentrates the mind in one direction, so that when there's
Speaker 1: nothing more arousing, then you have deeper relaxation, so you're
Speaker 1: focused on something and then you take a break, which
Speaker 1: is much more relaxing than doing nothing in the first place. Well, certainly,
Speaker 1: I can think. I don't know how closely related this is,
Speaker 1: but you can think of of moments in modern music
Speaker 1: and older music where you have that that full stop.
Speaker 1: Everything goes silent for a second and then the sound
Speaker 1: comes back before they drop the drop, right, Yeah, like
Speaker 1: the drop that the dub step drop or even of course, um,
Speaker 1: what was it that the Beatles song with the famous drop.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure which day in the life, right is
Speaker 1: that the one? Oh? I know what that song, but
Speaker 1: I can't remember if there's a drop in it where
Speaker 1: there's like everything gets very loud and then suddenly just
Speaker 1: like in silence. Our Beatles fans will have to when
Speaker 1: if I'm wrong, But but certainly their example of this
Speaker 1: throughout music the drop totally well, I mean it does
Speaker 1: focus the mind. The rests are as important as the beats.
Speaker 1: But of course the finding that the brain responds mainly
Speaker 1: to contrast and change is borne out by other research
Speaker 1: research in mice. So here's one interesting one that is
Speaker 1: also cited in the Nautilus piece. Back in two thousand
Speaker 1: ten at the University of Oregon, there was this interesting
Speaker 1: finding about how the brain reacts to silence. So the
Speaker 1: interesting fact is that the brain processes silence is a
Speaker 1: distinct type of input apart from sound. Remember we were
Speaker 1: talking about silence as a substance, so the brain sees
Speaker 1: it as such too. Yeah, the brain very much treats
Speaker 1: silence as a substance rather than just the absence of noise.
Speaker 1: So the researchers monitored the brains of rats exposed to
Speaker 1: bursts of sound and charted the brain activity for wind
Speaker 1: sounds began and when sounds ended. And what they found
Speaker 1: was that acts used to completely separate synaptic pathways for
Speaker 1: processing these types of sensation. So you hear a new sound,
Speaker 1: sound comes on, the brain does one thing, sound goes
Speaker 1: off the brains goes a completely different synaptic route to
Speaker 1: the auditory cortex. Something that it's it's doing a different
Speaker 1: kind of processing. And the first thing to notice is,
Speaker 1: of course this is necessary for the understanding of speech.
Speaker 1: When you're listening to somebody talk, how do you tell
Speaker 1: when one word ends and another begins? In spoken communication?
Speaker 1: You have to hear the spaces, and that's not so
Speaker 1: easy to do. It's not easy to get computers to
Speaker 1: do this right, because certainly, if you hear yourself talk,
Speaker 1: you hear other people talk uh to varying degrees depending
Speaker 1: on who's doing the during the talking. Yeah, though, the
Speaker 1: spaces between the words become almost microscopic. Yeah. And then
Speaker 1: of course this is also a survival mechanism. Have you
Speaker 1: ever thought about how unnerving it is to hear a
Speaker 1: sudden silence yes, I have Joe, So yeah, Fear is
Speaker 1: an adaptive mechanism, right. It triggers these survival behaviors. You've
Speaker 1: got a robot assassin coming at you, it's turning on
Speaker 1: its mini gun, wearing up and uh, and it triggers
Speaker 1: these survival behaviors. In dangerous situations, you've got an impulse
Speaker 1: to freeze and be quiet, or the body prepares itself
Speaker 1: to flee or or to fight for survival. Though I mean,
Speaker 1: if it's the robot with a mini gun, you don't
Speaker 1: have much of a good chance. But so, how do
Speaker 1: animals know when to be afraid? Well, decent question, and
Speaker 1: certainly one clue is if something has alerted other animals
Speaker 1: in their presence, right that if something has caused a
Speaker 1: quiet to spread amongst the surrounding organism. Right. And the
Speaker 1: question is is that sort of a universal language, an
Speaker 1: instinctual universal language among animals, And it looks like it
Speaker 1: might be so. One way, of course, and most can
Speaker 1: be afraid is learned fear associations. If every time you
Speaker 1: go to the red food bowl it shocks you, you're
Speaker 1: going to be afraid of the red food bowl. There's
Speaker 1: also instinctual, species specific triggers of fear like audible alarm
Speaker 1: calls or pheromones. But there was a study in two
Speaker 1: thousand twelve in Current Biology called silence resulting from the
Speaker 1: cessation of movement signals danger. And what this study found
Speaker 1: is that the other animal fear trigger is silence, specifically
Speaker 1: the sudden cessation of the sound of movement. You hear walking,
Speaker 1: talking here, moving along through the brush. When whenever that
Speaker 1: goes quiet, animals instinctively become afraid. They know something's wrong. Uh.
Speaker 1: And the author's right in their abstract quote as freezing
Speaker 1: is a pervasive fear response in animals. Silence may constitute
Speaker 1: a truly public queue used by a variety of animals
Speaker 1: in the ecosystem to detect impending danger. So this is
Speaker 1: interesting that it becomes across species language like you're you're not.
Speaker 1: You don't have to listen to your own uh, cod
Speaker 1: species you know calling out, be careful when you hear
Speaker 1: the birds becoming quiet, you know something's up, even if
Speaker 1: you are an escaped monkey from a from a lab,
Speaker 1: even if you are even if you're a wolverine. But
Speaker 1: then to come back on the other side, there is
Speaker 1: another biological role that silence seems to play and it's
Speaker 1: a positive nurturing one toward brain development. So there's study
Speaker 1: by im Key Kirsty in brain structure and function called
Speaker 1: is silence golden effects of auditory stimuli and their absence
Speaker 1: on adult hippocamp ll neurogenesis. So this essentially linked silence
Speaker 1: to brain development. And they tested four different sound conditions,
Speaker 1: which was so they had some mice and they tested
Speaker 1: standard background noise and an animal testing facility that sounds
Speaker 1: like a really pleasant noise. Uh. But then they also
Speaker 1: compared this to white noise that they might have gone
Speaker 1: with brown noise, but they didn't white noise the pup
Speaker 1: calls of mice, so you know, a little little mice
Speaker 1: calling out for the parents and silence. And the hypothesis
Speaker 1: going into this experiment was that the baby mouse calls,
Speaker 1: the pup calls would stimulate the growth of new brain
Speaker 1: cells in adults. And at first, all of the sounds
Speaker 1: except the white noise, did seem to encourage one specific
Speaker 1: type of brain cell growth neuro genesis in the hippocampus.
Speaker 1: But after seven days, only silence was still associated with
Speaker 1: this brain cell growth, and that was a total surprise.
Speaker 1: But the author's right quote. Our results indicate that the
Speaker 1: unnatural absence of auditory inputs, as well as spectro temporally
Speaker 1: rich albeit ethologically irrelevant stimuli, activate precursor cells in the
Speaker 1: case of silence, also leading to greater numbers of newborn
Speaker 1: immature neurons, whereas ambient and unstructured background auditory stimuli do
Speaker 1: not so. In other words, the theory is that artificial
Speaker 1: silence presents a healthy challenge to the brain, which prompts
Speaker 1: the brain to grow new brain cells in adaptation more
Speaker 1: so than any of these other background noises. It's interesting
Speaker 1: when you we need when you take that into account
Speaker 1: thinking about our own uh Like, So you're driving along
Speaker 1: in the car and he might think, oh, I need
Speaker 1: something to occupy my mind. Right, so I'm gonna put
Speaker 1: on some music and put on some podcast or what
Speaker 1: have you. Um but really your mind is gonna be
Speaker 1: able to occupy itself. Maybe, but again, perhaps that's part
Speaker 1: of the problem. You want you it's going to occupy itself.
Speaker 1: But maybe that's part of the problem. Well, it might
Speaker 1: just occupy itself with obsession over your own mortality or
Speaker 1: with other things that you just don't have time for. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the basic default mode network. Right, So this really complex
Speaker 1: picture of silence is emerging. For me, the substance of
Speaker 1: silence is is strange because uh, it's freedom from noise.
Speaker 1: Of course, it seems to promote relaxation, We've seen that.
Speaker 1: But then you go into an intensely quiet room, we
Speaker 1: become aware of deeper and deeper noises, deeper into the
Speaker 1: quiet verse, and you start to go crazy. People lose
Speaker 1: their minds, they can't stand it. And then periods of
Speaker 1: silence seem to promote healthy growth of brain cells, seems
Speaker 1: to be good for at least the brains of mice. Um.
Speaker 1: But then the sudden silence also triggers fear and alarm.
Speaker 1: So it seems our reactions to silence are almost as
Speaker 1: complex as our reactions to sound itself. Which makes me
Speaker 1: wonder is there really such a thing as silence? And
Speaker 1: if so, what is the ideal quiet? What are we
Speaker 1: really going for when we want some peace and quiet?
Speaker 1: What is it we have in mind? M hm, Well,
Speaker 1: I feel like this is um. This is a question
Speaker 1: that is complicated by just the human experience of silence form,
Speaker 1: you know, for for one thing, because what I'm engaging
Speaker 1: with with actual silence. I'm also very engaging to varying
Speaker 1: degrees with inner silence and weighing those two and then
Speaker 1: if that's going to color my memory about how quiet
Speaker 1: a particular setting was, you know, like if I like
Speaker 1: I've gone places before, like when I had to think
Speaker 1: of for this podcast, like what are the quietest places
Speaker 1: I've been to? I can the places that come to
Speaker 1: mind are like wilderness environments. They were not necessarily quiet.
Speaker 1: Like one was like, um, kind of on top of
Speaker 1: the mountain and Yosemite, and there weren't any human noises
Speaker 1: around me other than like I think I was. I
Speaker 1: was pretty worn out by the time I reached the top. Uh,
Speaker 1: but you know that the wind was sweeping through, blowing
Speaker 1: across the trees and the and the rocks. Uh that
Speaker 1: there was a sound of loose rocks underfoot as I ascended.
Speaker 1: But yet, you know, part of part of it was
Speaker 1: probably physical exertion, part of it was just the you know,
Speaker 1: an entirely new physical environment, a slightly different you know,
Speaker 1: sound environment. Like all of that further colored my interpretation
Speaker 1: of it as quiet. You know, So when I look
Speaker 1: back on it now, I'm it's easy for me to say, oh,
Speaker 1: that was one of the quietest places I've been to.
Speaker 1: But in a way it was just loud in different ways,
Speaker 1: both sonically and like just visually loud. I thought of
Speaker 1: the same thing. I mean, I was able to think
Speaker 1: of Big Bend, which was actually I think, relatively quiet.
Speaker 1: But when I when I think of quiet places, I
Speaker 1: just think of like nature and stuff like that. It's
Speaker 1: not quiet at all. There's bugs everywhere. I was up
Speaker 1: in Tennessee last weekend, sitting out on the porch one night,
Speaker 1: and I was thinking, Man, it's so nice and quiet
Speaker 1: out here. It was not even remotely quote. It was
Speaker 1: incredibly loud with different like the uh. It's like a
Speaker 1: it's like a Phil Specter wall of sound, engineered entirely
Speaker 1: by bugs. They're filling in every single conceivable hole where
Speaker 1: there could be a noise. They've all got their niche
Speaker 1: and it's all there. It's like a it's like a
Speaker 1: like a Queen metal song, you know where they it's
Speaker 1: just a floor to ceiling. Oh yeah. I camped in
Speaker 1: okay Finoki swamp here in Georgia several years back, went
Speaker 1: on a canoe trip uh, and it was legitimately hard
Speaker 1: to sleep that night because the insects were so loud
Speaker 1: and the frogs, frogs like actually underneath the platform that
Speaker 1: we had our tents set up on, were just so
Speaker 1: incredibly loud. It was it was worse than trying to
Speaker 1: sleep in a city. But but in my memory I
Speaker 1: interpreted this as peace and quiet. Yeah. Yeah, and in
Speaker 1: a sense it is. But it's but again that that
Speaker 1: kind of that that's why so complicated to try and think, like, well,
Speaker 1: what's what's my ideal level of silence, because you know what,
Speaker 1: a doctor's waiting room can be pretty quiet. But oh
Speaker 1: that's no good at all. Yeah, but it's not good
Speaker 1: because you're about to go and see the doctor. Your
Speaker 1: head is probably more a lot I've with with worry
Speaker 1: and concerns and what ifs than uh than any other time.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm I wonder what it would be like
Speaker 1: to find it soothing to sit in a silent room
Speaker 1: and hear nothing but the sound of a pencil scraping
Speaker 1: against paper as it describes the shape of a mole. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, it also makes me think of airports we mentioned,
Speaker 1: you know earlier in um in jest. But of course
Speaker 1: he created music for airports wonderful ambient album, and every
Speaker 1: time I listened to it, or and or every time
Speaker 1: I'm in an actual airport, I think, why am I
Speaker 1: listening to CNN on several different TVs on top of
Speaker 1: all the noise instead of music for airports? Is is
Speaker 1: there an idea here that actually more distraction? Is is better?
Speaker 1: Like that is the form of silence that works better
Speaker 1: in an airport as opposed to be the the the
Speaker 1: idea of silence, uh in the midst of ambient music.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know either. Or should we
Speaker 1: just all have, you know, our our heads encased in
Speaker 1: some sort of sarcophagus to enforce silence upon us? Well
Speaker 1: that's another. Even even if you put in ear plugs
Speaker 1: and you you know, you're very good ones, and you
Speaker 1: don't hear what's going on around you, there is still
Speaker 1: a sort of connected sense of touch, you know, the
Speaker 1: vibrational energy. There's some sort of blending between our sense
Speaker 1: of touch and our sense of hearing. Yeah, yeah, and
Speaker 1: certainly you're still gonna receive those uh, those waves you're
Speaker 1: certainly gonna hear with your skull uh to a large degree.
Speaker 1: So yeah, you're not gonna be able to to to
Speaker 1: completely silence it out. So Robert, here's something that I
Speaker 1: read about when I was, you know, doing some browsing
Speaker 1: on the subject of silence, the idea of enforced silence.
Speaker 1: That's a hard thing to pull off, right, because you
Speaker 1: can isolate somebody, you can put them in solitary, you
Speaker 1: can go u you know, Cold War John C. Lily
Speaker 1: and drop somebody in an isolation tank. But for the
Speaker 1: most partly people have a right to be loud, and
Speaker 1: people can be loud outwardly and certainly inwardly. You know,
Speaker 1: I don't usually think of a prison as a place
Speaker 1: that's going to be especially a refuge of peace and quiet.
Speaker 1: But in the nineteenth century there was this regime that
Speaker 1: I read about known as the Auburn system. It evolved
Speaker 1: in the Auburn Prison of Auburn, New York. And the
Speaker 1: way this worked is that you had prisoners whould go
Speaker 1: out perform hard labor all day, and then they were
Speaker 1: put in solitary confinement at night, with enforced silence at
Speaker 1: all times, no talking. Well, that sounds absolutely dreadful, absolutely shredful. Well, anyway,
Speaker 1: the idea, I guess is that you know, criminals, they
Speaker 1: learn habits, they learn things from each other, They learn
Speaker 1: and reinforce bad behaviors from other criminals through some sort
Speaker 1: of perverted form of social education. But if the prisoners
Speaker 1: can't make a sound, they can't communicate with one another
Speaker 1: in order to reinforce and instruct. But I'm curious how,
Speaker 1: I mean, not like I think it would be ethical
Speaker 1: to do this in any case, But putting questions of
Speaker 1: ethicality aside, did this work? Did people really find that
Speaker 1: this increased penitence caused people to stop living a criminal lifestyle?
Speaker 1: I I am almost positive that this did not. My
Speaker 1: bet is that this did not work, though it does
Speaker 1: sound like, you know, perfectly deplorable from you know, by
Speaker 1: nineteenth century penal standards. I mean, I think I think
Speaker 1: it sort of fits with the idea of you know what,
Speaker 1: do you need? Nothing? You need? You need your Bible
Speaker 1: and you need quiet reflection, and so they put you
Speaker 1: in a room by yourself, no talking, read your Bible
Speaker 1: and that's it. And I guess it was supposed to
Speaker 1: encourage guilt, you know, guilt and remorse and feelings of
Speaker 1: wanting to reform. But I don't know. I think when
Speaker 1: you force people to be silent, do you also encourage
Speaker 1: them to stew on what bothers them? Well, I yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's you're not necessarily making any positive movement there.
Speaker 1: I mean, in researching this episode, it did a lot
Speaker 1: of searches around for silence related UM studies, and silence
Speaker 1: can have many meanings. Of course, as we've already discussed,
Speaker 1: one meaning we haven't really gotten into is silence in
Speaker 1: terms of not talking about your problems, not talking about
Speaker 1: what's botting, You're not talking about an issue. Well, that's
Speaker 1: another You've done an episode of this show before. It
Speaker 1: was also several years ago in the Spiral Silence, which
Speaker 1: is not not so much about sound but just about
Speaker 1: not speaking up, And yeah, that that becomes an echo
Speaker 1: chamber of its own. Um. But I mean on top
Speaker 1: of that, of course, the all of the research indicates
Speaker 1: that solitary confinement is just a brutal tactic to use
Speaker 1: against anybody. So I think it is it is now
Speaker 1: coming to be considered a form of torture, so I'd
Speaker 1: be willing to look into it more. But I my
Speaker 1: my firm suspicion is that this uh, this prison experiment
Speaker 1: like so like pretty much anything you call a prison
Speaker 1: experience probably did not have great, great outcome. Now, of course,
Speaker 1: that's when silence is imposed upon you, inflicted upon you.
Speaker 1: But but certainly they're there are plenty of models for
Speaker 1: embracing silence, taking on vows of silence, certainly. Uh. There
Speaker 1: a number of monastic traditions and the Catholic tradition that
Speaker 1: come to mind. Uh. It Also, silence also plays a
Speaker 1: role in Hindu philosophy, where it is uh mauna. Also,
Speaker 1: even the Greek philosopher of Pythagoras of Samos imposed a
Speaker 1: rule of silence on his uh disciples of Pythagora, in
Speaker 1: silence stints of five years or more, even to prove
Speaker 1: your commitment. Apparently the music of the spheres you can't
Speaker 1: hear it unless you stop talking. Yeah, And then of
Speaker 1: course there's the whole issue of silence. Uh in the world,
Speaker 1: place silence in study, you know here at how stuff works.
Speaker 1: Over over the years, I've seen I've seen this this transformation.
Speaker 1: So like when I first started here, like eight or
Speaker 1: nine years ago, we had these bid and you were
Speaker 1: here at at the time we have these big but
Speaker 1: six years yeah, it was still in the same office.
Speaker 1: So it was like sort of big three sided cubicles,
Speaker 1: really spacious. Uh. You felt like a monk in um
Speaker 1: in the library at times. You know, you're able to
Speaker 1: get your materials, you have your computer, and you were
Speaker 1: working away on your on your own. There were days
Speaker 1: where you didn't you didn't necessarily see anybody that was
Speaker 1: seated on an opposite row from you. And uh, We've
Speaker 1: had a couple of different offices since then, and things
Speaker 1: have gotten more open office, as is the trend right
Speaker 1: where the ideas that oh, we're gonna treat treat everything
Speaker 1: like it's a newsroom, treat everything, uh in a way
Speaker 1: so that we're inspiring all sorts of uh, you know,
Speaker 1: vital and imaginative, creative energy. Easel will just free flow
Speaker 1: and ricochet around the office. Man, there is nothing more
Speaker 1: inspiring than overhearing somebody else's work conversation. Yeah, um, you know.
Speaker 1: And I feel like there are there are professions where
Speaker 1: an opus opened an office environment work better their individuals
Speaker 1: for whom it works better. Um. I think the problem
Speaker 1: is always we need try applying any kind of one
Speaker 1: size fits all um plan to a workforce. Well, it
Speaker 1: seems to me from what I've read, everything is open office.
Speaker 1: Now it's what everybody does. I'm not quite sure why
Speaker 1: that trend has caught on, but but it's not just
Speaker 1: it's not just here in the work world. I mean
Speaker 1: you also see it out in the world of scientific research.
Speaker 1: In fact, there there have been some papers in recent
Speaker 1: years so they've brought this up saying that, hey, we
Speaker 1: have too much enforced interaction in science. Um. In fact,
Speaker 1: Peter Higgs has stated that the Higgs Boson of the
Speaker 1: Higgs Boson has stated that the piece and quiet at
Speaker 1: that he was afforded in the nineteen sixties, which resulted
Speaker 1: in his Nobel Prize winning work, is no longer possible,
Speaker 1: you know. So you have you have a number of
Speaker 1: scientists over the years who have really been um the
Speaker 1: proponents of silence. Newton, Einstein, just just to name a
Speaker 1: few here. They've all prized silence and isolation. And if
Speaker 1: they were working today, would they have it? And if
Speaker 1: they didn't have it, would they have been able to
Speaker 1: achieve the ends that they that they achieved in their lives. Well,
Speaker 1: not to mention how much they'd be required to tweet
Speaker 1: about their ongoing research and upcoming conferences. I'll do that.
Speaker 1: Facebook live. Make sure Newton that you do your Facebook life.
Speaker 1: You gotta understand you're gonna do something with an apple. Um,
Speaker 1: whether you have a dog, door something. Let's get some
Speaker 1: let's point some some cameras at that. Facebook wants to
Speaker 1: know what is this? Yes? Why am I seeing this? Who?
Speaker 1: Who are you? Uh? Well, it's the world. It's the world.
Speaker 1: We have the world we have to deal with. Uh,
Speaker 1: and we'll we'll find a way to work through the noise.
Speaker 1: I mean that's the scenario at any point, right right, No,
Speaker 1: no matter how noise do you think the world is.
Speaker 1: No matter how quiet a slice you've carved out for yourself,
Speaker 1: you're still going to have to work through the noise. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean that brings us back to the to the question.
Speaker 1: I guess the core questions substance of silence? What is it?
Speaker 1: And why is some silence desirable but other silence is not?
Speaker 1: So you might put in this loud white noise track
Speaker 1: at work in order to get some quiet from the
Speaker 1: conversations that are going on around you. So you're increasing
Speaker 1: the volume in order to get some peace and quiet.
Speaker 1: The signals again that that is clearly about something about
Speaker 1: the the introduction and novelty of sound rather than the
Speaker 1: volume of sound. I guess I'd be tempted to think
Speaker 1: of it as oxygen, you know, and like I might
Speaker 1: want to take a breath of pure oxygen every now
Speaker 1: and then, but I don't know, for fun, just for fun.
Speaker 1: But I don't want to necessarily live in an environment
Speaker 1: of pure oxygen and breathe it all the time. That
Speaker 1: would kill you. But but but every now and then
Speaker 1: I'll sleep in my specialized oxygen tent. Uh and uh,
Speaker 1: and it will revitalize me. But hey, that's uh, that's
Speaker 1: our take on the topic. We we put it to you, though,
Speaker 1: what is the quietest place you have ever found yourself in?
Speaker 1: What what's the quietest place you've visited? What is the
Speaker 1: quietest place you have created for yourself in your own life?
Speaker 1: And I guess the question is a dual question, right,
Speaker 1: what's the place that has felt the most quiet to you,
Speaker 1: like the ideal mind silence versus what's actually the lowest
Speaker 1: number of ambient decibels? Be very interested to hear, Hey,
Speaker 1: maybe you've even been to one of these, uh, these
Speaker 1: soundless chambers that we've created in the world. I want
Speaker 1: to hear from the people, and I know they've got
Speaker 1: to be out there, the people who went in one
Speaker 1: and did not get all freaked out, because I'm sure
Speaker 1: there are some people. I'm sure we hear about the
Speaker 1: ones that get freaked out. Have you been to one
Speaker 1: of these things and didn't really bother you? I want
Speaker 1: to hear about that. I mean, there are people who
Speaker 1: who are noisy enough and or make enough noises just
Speaker 1: moving around, uh that I think they would they would
Speaker 1: fare just fine, like they would never notice. They're just
Speaker 1: if you're just sitting there like groaning to yourself and
Speaker 1: cracking your knuckles and talking to yourself and groaning some
Speaker 1: more than you know, you're probably not gonna notice the
Speaker 1: desk about how we'll show all them, show all there
Speaker 1: griping about your office environment all that. Let's stop being grumpy, Robert.
Speaker 1: How can they get in touch with us? Oh? Hey,
Speaker 1: before we do that, we should also mention that this
Speaker 1: week we are going to be in New York. That's right,
Speaker 1: if you were in New York, specifically, if you were
Speaker 1: attending the The Star Trek Mission New York uh Con
Speaker 1: in New York City, then you should you should check
Speaker 1: us out. We're gonna be there, We're gonna be doing
Speaker 1: a presentation. It's gonna be Star Treky, it's gonna be science,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be a little cosmic, it's gonna be a
Speaker 1: will uh psychological. Yeah. So the conference goes from September
Speaker 1: two to September four. If if you're gonna be there,
Speaker 1: our panel will be on Friday afternoon in the early afternoon,
Speaker 1: and you can look us up in the conference materials.
Speaker 1: But yeah, so if if you're around, come say hi, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: come here what we have to say, and then uh
Speaker 1: have a little chat with us afterwards. And in the meantime,
Speaker 1: head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: That's where you'll find all of the podcast, the videos,
Speaker 1: blog post links out to our various social media accounts,
Speaker 1: uh and that Facebook account Blow the Mind. You will
Speaker 1: definitely find information there about the upcoming Star Trek thing.
Speaker 1: And if you want to get in touch with us,
Speaker 1: as always, you can email us and blow the mind
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com for more on this
Speaker 1: and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com. Ayther Ynys starts four starts apart f