From the Vault: The Substance of Silence

We all have a pretty good notion of noise, but what exactly is silence? Is it a substance or an absence? Between the mindflaying quiet of soundless rooms to wildlife ambience and white noise machines, what is the ideal balance of silence? In this episode of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast, Robert and Joe look for answers and, yes, also discuss a few sound-sensitive monsters and the likelihood of blowing up a humanoid head with sound. (Originally published on Aug. 31, 2016)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
The vault door open, it be yes, and the thing
that it contains this uh, this weekend, we can't even
properly relate to you because it is it contains absolute silence.
And I no matter where you're listening to this, uh
this episode, you're probably not in a in a place

(00:29):
to appreciate that level of silence. Obviously, if you're listening
to a podcast, you are not going to be appreciating
that level of silence. And you've probably got a million
other sounds going on outside of your headphone environment or
your car listening environment. But but still, silence is this
fascinating topic. It's this, it's it seems to have it
almost has a substance, and yet at the same time

(00:50):
is an emptiness. Right, So we maybe recommend you find
a little place with some peace and quiet and give
this one a listen. This originally aired on August thirty one, sixteen.
It looks like it was published at three am. I
don't know what that means. Maybe that's some kind of
archival error. Uh, I wonder what was going on that
week anyway? Uh so, yeah, So this is the substance

(01:12):
of silence. From Hope you enjoy. Welcome to stuff to
Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey,
welcome to stuff to Blow your mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and done Joe McCormick and Robert. I'd like

(01:34):
you to think about something, and that's what I'm here for.
I want you to think about the idea of the
substance of absence in our in our sensory experience of
the world. So we all experienced this in our lives
where there is a stark disconnect between everything we know
about physics and what are intuitions tell us. And one

(01:55):
of the examples of this is that there is no
such substance in physics as cold, right, Cold is just
the absence of heat energy. And yet if you haven't
experienced like mine, when you hold an ice cube in
your hand, it doesn't just feel like heat is leaving
your body. It certainly feels like you are meeting cold.

(02:15):
You are meeting a substance of coldness that is an
independent material reality in itself, not not unlike how many
people process sight as a beam coming out of their eyes,
like they think about it in those terms, even though
most of those people, I think are going to realize
that that's not how vision works. But we can't help

(02:37):
it interpret what's happening as such. Yeah, it's almost like
people think of sight as an apprehending power. It's like
you would reach out to pick something up. So in
order to get visions, you must be reaching out with
your eyes in some way to pull things in. Also
to mention light, there's no such substance in physics as darkness.
Of course, darkness is just the absence of light. But

(02:58):
when a cloud passes in front of the sun and
it casts a shadow over the earth, and you get
that little shiver when that happens, it is hard not
to think of that shadow, the darkness, as a substance
unto itself, at least if you're like me. Yeah, I mean,
unless an entity is actually stepping out of the negative
material plane, right, if there's actual actually a denizen of

(03:19):
the shadow realm uh, breaching your immediate universe. Well, of
course I speak not of beings of darkness, because merely
to speak of them is to summon them, And now
we should be watching our backs. But another substance like
this is the substance of silence, right, So silence is
not a thing. It's merely the absence of the vibrational

(03:41):
pressure waves of energy that we call sound. But in
psychological terms, I wonder is silence a substance in the
same way as cold and darker to me? And if
it is, I think we may have come across some
interesting biological reasons for feeling this way. So Robert, back in,

(04:01):
you and Julie did an episode of this show where
you talked about the quietest place in the entire world.
And I went back and listened to the episode, and
at this time, uh, the quietest place in the world
was a type of room known as an antichoic chamber,
meaning a chamber that's echo free no echoes, at a
facility in Minneapolis, Minnesota called or Field Laboratories. You remember

(04:24):
doing this episode. I assume no one has wiped your memory.
It's amazing how much I forget about some some old episodes. Um,
but I do remember this one. Yes, Okay, So if
you haven't seen it, you should google pictures of this
lab facility you out there listening. According to Atlas Obscure,
it's actually in the same building where Bob Dylan recorded

(04:45):
Blood on the Tracks. Not the same room, but the
same building. Uh. And so this room is used to
test appliances and equipment for sound production under very very
sensitive conditions by creating the most the quietest environ rement
we could imagine. And to achieve these conditions, the room
has been built in a very weird way. So it's

(05:06):
got double layered steel and foot thick concrete walls. It's
got this vault type door, and then on the walls
from floor to ceiling, they are covered with fiberglass acoustic wedges,
which are these fuzzy looking three foot long axe blades
that stab out into the room from the walls. And

(05:26):
it looks like at any moment the trap is going
to spring and the walls will begin closing in and
these wedges are going to become interlocking teeth, you know,
to grind your bones between them. But as far as
we know, it is not a trap. People have been
to the room and survived, uh, though maybe not unscathed.
So it's just a room with a very powerful thirst

(05:46):
for absorbing sound. And according to the Guinness Book of
World Records, account the ambient sound levels inside it are
about negative thirteen decibels or d b a actually, which
is just an adjusted version of decibel measurement. We will
horrify the audio engineers and just use decibels for simplicity,
say going forward. But so when you when you hear

(06:08):
something like negative thirteen decibels, that might sound kind of weird, right,
How how could you have negative sound? Yeah, especially since
you you look at various lists and near total silences
zero A whispers fifteen, So it's like a negative whisper.
How is that possible? Well, zero decibels actually doesn't mean

(06:29):
no sound. Zero decibels is just taken to be the
threshold of normal human hearing at birth, your best hearing,
infancy hearing people can usually detect sounds above zero decibels.
Below zero decibels, you know, too bad. Human scale. It's
a scale based on human perception of sound, not sound

(06:49):
as some sort of um concrete thing outside of human
experience exactly. And so going into this space of negative
decibels is like going into the under verse. It puts
you in a very bizarre state of mind. People who
have gone here report that they have a hard time
staying in the room too long. They used to have
this thing. All all the articles about it mentioned this

(07:11):
challenge that the owner seems very excited about, where he
would test people to see how long they could stay
in there. He seemed to get some kind of sadistic
pleasure out of it. But in the under verse with
the necromongers from Chronicles of Riddick, I do appreciate a
good Chronicles of Riddick reference to Actually, I've never seen
chronically that's the under verse is a big deal on
that the under verse is bigger than than Riddick. Oh well,

(07:33):
I don't know. Riddick's pretty big. If you've seen his arms,
he's very, very big. I guess you'll. You'll have to
show it to me someday. But so anyway, supposedly inside
this antecote chamber, what happens is people become just hyper
aware of the sounds produced by their own bodies. You are,
you start to hear the thump of your own heart,
and hear the kind of squelching of your digestive system,

(07:54):
and you hear this hissing and rustling which is your
own respiration. And media reports also claim him that people
become dizzy, disoriented, sometimes kind of panicky, which suggests that
our hearing is in some way tied to our body
orientation and movement. Right, you may have read these stories
about blind people using forms of echolocation to hear where
they are in a room, but this kind of suggests

(08:16):
that even people with normal senses, all their senses functioning normally,
might still use some kind of echolocation and basic body orientation.
My favorite detail I heard was I read one story
in The Guardian about a man who went into this
room and he claimed that after his ears adjusted, he
could hear his own scalp moving over his skull when

(08:37):
he changed facial expressions. You know, one of the important
things to keep in mind about all this too, is that,
of course it goes without saying that humans have evolved
to thrive in a certain sort of environment and with
a certain amount of sound in their immediate environment. So
we're we have We did not evolve to to live

(08:58):
in in quiet chambers. We ev all to live in
the world, and so when we are deprived of almost
like the oxygen of sound, so much we have to
it's almost like the mind has to gulp in more
of it. Yeah, if it doesn't have something to chew on,
it will start chewing on itself, which is certainly a
trend that occurs time and time again in any kind

(09:19):
of experiment looking into sensory deprivation. And we are discussing,
you know, one major area of sensory deprivation here. And
this is another thing that gets mentioned in in context
with these antecode chambers, is that you might go into
there and experience auditory hallucinations just because of that sensory
deprivation element. But anyway, since that podcast that you and

(09:41):
Julie recorded, there's a new kid in town. Microsoft has
built a silent mind Flare chamber, even more psychedelically quiet
than the one in or Field Labs, and much like
the other facility, this one is used for sort of
audio and device testing in very sensitive conditions. But it's
located at Microsoft's Audio lab in Redmond, Washington, and according

(10:02):
to Business Wire, Microsoft contracted a company called Echo Noise
Control Technology I think actually the same company that built
the oar Field Room UH to build this new dungeon
of lost whis perhaps for them, and it was completed
in July. But compared to ore Fields negative thirteen decibles,
this room gets as quiet as negative twenty point six decibles,

(10:24):
and this is close to about as quiet as a
room filled with atmosphere can possibly be. So, since sound
is caused by mechanical pressure waves in a medium such
as air or water, there is no sound at all
in a vacuum. If you were to go into the
vacuum of space, you wouldn't hear anything but in a
room filled screams exactly. But in a room filled with

(10:45):
normal atmosphere, negative twenty three decibels is about as quiet
as things can get, because that's the sound level of
what's known as Brownie in motion, which is the random
movement of air particles rustling against one another. I would
love to hear what that sounds like. I think Brownie
in motion of air particles it is actually an eno album, Yeah, yeah,

(11:07):
like a late seventies a perfect companion to metal machine music. Anyway,
So I started thinking about this room and about how
there are actually plenty of god beings and monsters from
the history of human imagination who have found themselves in
a dire quest for a place like this room. I

(11:29):
think that the quest for peace and quiet is it's
we think of it as something of the modern age, right,
you live in the city, or there's the traffic horns,
honking people, screaming people I don't know, arguing about Pokemon
Go and about whether adults should play it or not
outside your window at all hours of the night. And
we come to associate this feeling of of this noisy

(11:52):
cacaphony with modernity. But but this feeling goes way back.
Oh yeah, I mean, really, human haven't changed that much,
not so much that they've stopped being annoying and obnoxious
and loud. U. We've we've had allowed talkers among us.
We've had we've had individuals who cannot wake up silently. Uh.

(12:16):
Since time out of mind. Though then again, I do
think it's kind of interesting. We're going to mention a
few of these that the quest for silence, the desire
for peace and quiet, is often associated with villains, not heroes.
Well you do see, Yeah, I mean I think I
think it falls on both sides. Uh. I guess the
heroes that are seeking silence, they tend to want to

(12:39):
share that path to silence with others. So it's more about, hey, everybody,
let me show you the way to the silence. Let
me show you a way of silence. That will better
your life, whereas the monsters are a little more selfish. Well.
One great example of this is the Animo a Leash,
the creation myth of ancient Mesopotamia, which you see in
ancient sumi Arian and Babylonian texts. Originally at Sumerian focused

(13:03):
on the god in Leal. Later the Babylonian version is
altered to glorify the Babylonian god mar Duke. But the
story is pretty much that the gods Apsu and Tiamat
freshwater and saltwater personified. They they sort of live in
this primordial chaos, and they create a younger generation of
gods who just make a great rucus. They cause disorder,

(13:26):
irritating noise, and Opsu, in reaction to this, plots to
destroy his creations in order to get some peace and quiet.
Quote by day I cannot rest, by night, I cannot
lie down in peace. But I will destroy their way.
Let there be lamentation, and let us lie down again
in peace. Oh nice. Now, of course, later a hero

(13:50):
has to come and fight these beings. Actually, so Apsu
gets destroyed and then Tiamatt his his sort of companion,
his female counterpart, becomes a monster that has to be fought.
But so yeah, not the heroes of the piece here,
but they want some peace and quiet. That all all
these new created beings are just too loud and irritating.

(14:12):
It's in it always the way. The youth are loud,
and they need to they need to pipe down because
those old people are trying to get some sleep. I
wonder if that is what's behind the idea of Grendel
in Beowolf. Oh yeah, because he he quite famously is
not a fan of the noise, not a fan of
the partying that's coming from the mead hall across the way, right,

(14:36):
So what's what's the basic story of Grendel and Beowulf.
It's Beowulf comes to Rathgar's mead Hall of hero right
in the land of the Dane Men, and they they
party in the hall and have their big feasts, and
somewhere nearby there's this monster called Grendel. Not actually described
physically very much. Yeah, virtually no physical description um, which

(15:01):
means basically any interpretation you have is valid. I did
read some great translations of the description. What they do
say about him. The march Stepper, famous who dwelt in
the more Fins the Marsh and the fastness a fiend
in hell. This ghastly demon was named Grendel, infamous stalker

(15:21):
of the Marches, who held the Moor's finn and desolate stronghold,
the land of the Marsh monsters. Nice. I always liked
the way that John Gardner described him in his novel
A Grendel, which is one of my my favorites. He
described him his quote a shadow shooter, earth rim romer,
walker of the world's weird wall. Oh, that's so great,

(15:44):
and that captures this is a feature of the Anglo
Saxon poetry, is the alliteration there where you hear the
same words starting consonants used over and over, and Gardner
captures that very well. But anyway, so in the story,
of course Beowulf has to go and kill Grendel, and
the reason he does that is because basically he is
but also it's because Grendel comes into Rothgar's meat hall

(16:07):
and and messes them up. He comes in and kills
he does a lot of people in the in the
Dane Men's defense. Yeah, So why does he come into
the mead hall and kill the Dane men. Well, there
are a couple of ways. You could read this, but
the basic way is the way it's described in the poem.
It's kind of vague, but it seems like he's annoyed
by the noise they're making. So one translation reads quote

(16:30):
then the bold spirit impatiently endured dreary time, He who
dwelt in darkness, He that every day heard noise of
revelry loud in the hall. There was the harmony of
the harp, the sweet song of the poet. Uh, and
he doesn't like this noise. Now, it's unclear to me,
and I think they're actually differing opinions on this, whether
the text means that Grendel was actually jealous of the Danes,

(16:55):
you know, friendship and happiness their their camaraderie in the party,
or merely that he just couldn't stand the noise. The
sound of it bothered him. Well, this is the same
question we ask ourselves when whenever we're annoyed by a
neighbor having allowed party. Am I annoyed because they are
loud and I want to sleep right now? Or am
I allowed because I was not invited? Or I am

(17:16):
not invited to parties like this anymore? That that line
of questioning, well, it might be hard to tell the difference. Robert,
you made a fascinating observation I had never considered before.
Oh yeah, tell me tell me about Oh well, I've
I read a lot of Dr SEUs books these days,
and so anytime I read or if we end up
viewing The Grinch, Who's still Christmas, the comparisons are are

(17:40):
pretty uh, are pretty obvious, because in Grendel you have
a monster that lives out in the boonies who comes
into the center of civilization and unleash's havoc when there
is too much noise, and the same thing happens with
the Grinch. The Grinch hates the noise of the Christmas season,
even the g r is there. Yeah, that seems like

(18:01):
it's got to be intentional. Right, Oh, the noise, noise, noise, noise,
noise is one thing I hate, all the noise, noise, noise, noise.
It's the who's in Whoville are like the Dane men
and hero Yeah, except instead of you know, coming in
and killing who's, he just was gonna he's gonna uh,
you know, he's gonna surgically remove the cause of their joy. Uh,

(18:24):
and the joy being the cause of their noise, But
of course that backfires and he has to remove Christmas. Yeah,
but then his heart grew three sizes that day. Yeah,
they're a number of anatomical complications in the comparison, but
it doesn't happen to Grindel. Grendel, I believe his head
shrinks many sizes that day. Yeah, but well I'm not
sure he gets his head cut off. Yeah. Also of

(18:46):
the arm, yeah, arm to the arm, the arm is
cut off? First? Is that a call going got cut off?
Because I think blades don't quite cut him, like blades
melt or something when they when they hit his blood.
There's some description. There's some descriptions that can be interpreted
that either Grendel's blood is acidic and is eating through
the blade or it is so hot that it is

(19:07):
melting the blade. But Beowulf just rips off the arm
and then Grendel runs away. Wow. So here we've got
these monsters and god beings, uh, causing mayhem and havoc
and trouble for the creatures that dwell under their level
of power by trying to shut them up, just wanting silence,
and and if we can only find a room for Grendel,

(19:29):
if we could find an antechoic chamber for him. This
never would have happened. But I wondered if there are
any straight up gods of silence. Well there is, um Hippocrates,
the Greek god of silence, and he's thought to have
evolved from the childhood variant of the Egyptian god Horace.
But ultimately Hippocrates is really more about secrets than silence.

(19:53):
Uh So, it's it's more about yeah, you know, occult
knowledge in many interpretations, as opposed to just oh I
need a nice meditative place to think. I knew there
was a group of monsters in doctor who called the Silence,
but I looked at them up and found that their
name is somewhat misleading. Oh yeah, what do they do?
Uh they engineer history and cause people to have mass

(20:15):
forgettings of events and stuff. But as far as I know,
they're not especially all that quiet. Uh well, one one
that is quiet. I have to confess, I'm not a
doctor expert. I don't know that much of what What
did you ever watch Buffy? No? I actually didn't should
I it's a lot of fun. You know, you kind
of have to plow through that first season. But but

(20:37):
it's it's all it's all fun after that, as I recall,
but one episode in particular, one of the best episodes UH,
is titled Hush, and it concerns a group of sort
of fairy tale ghoulish creatures called the Gentleman, and they
come to town to steal everyone's voices, leaving them unable
to scream when they come around and cut everyone's hearts out.

(21:01):
And then we finally learned that if you the reason
here is because loud noises such as those caused by
a screaming human, cause the creatures heads to explode. Now
that's funny. You should mention it, because one thing we
do know is that loud noises can definitely cause injury
and damage to live in creatures. Oh yeah, I mean
there's a lot of data out there about about noise pollution. UM.

(21:24):
You know various uh, various human I mean humans even,
but also plenty of non human animals. Uh. The distraction
alone can put many prey animals at an increasing risk
of predation UH. And the more pronounced effects are generally
found in marine mammals such as whales and also in cephalopods. UH.
The giant squid actually offers the clearest example of this, yeah,

(21:47):
in the in the early two thousand's low frequency sound
pulse exercises that I believe we're being utilized by the
oil industry. Um, it was like dynamite fishing for squid,
right right. Yeah, essentially they're they're blasting out these um,
these low frequency pulses and then dead squid start to
start just popping up, and they seem to have extensive

(22:08):
bodily damage. And uh, when they looked closer, they found
that like their mantles were reduced to pulp, there was
bruised muscles, lesions in their statusists, which are these fluid
filled organs that rest behind the creatures eyes that helped
them maintain their ballots and position. In a few years
after this, Spanish marine biologists and gal Gara investigated this

(22:30):
further and found that low frequency sound exposure intensities between
a hundred fifty seven and a hundred seventy five decibels
and frequency range which is very loud. Yeah. One of
the things to drive home and some throughout some comparisons
here in a bit is that, yeah, underwater, uh, sounds
can really get up there. Some of our loudest noises

(22:52):
on earth, they're occurring underwater. Um. But but anyway, and
this experiment found that that there is a great deal
of statusus tissue damage, including the destruction of tiny inverted
hair like sensory structures in the cells that helped the
creatures maintain their balance. So this effectively crippled them and
even the the the the various celli pods that they studied,

(23:16):
the ones that survived the experiment exhibited in some cases
visible holes in the tissues. So we're talking you know, legitimate, yeah, yeah, yeah,
I mean the worst if you're comparing places to be
next to a bomb um, the water is far worse.
Like if someone throw if you're at if your pool
side and someone throws a grenade, two grenades into your vicinity,

(23:39):
one in the water, one on the surface. Definitely stay
on the surface, but also avoid pool parties where grenades
are being thrown around. How do you keep getting invited
to those I don't know? Um? Like when I when
I when they stopped inviting me, And then I'm gonna
I'm gonna feel bad. I'm gonna look back on and say,
why why don't they invite me to these loud, noisy
grenade parties? Uh, and I wish I could go to

(24:01):
sleep now, Robert, right before we get back to the
subject of silence, I know everybody wants to know how
do you make a human head explode with sound? All right,
so this is a pretty cool There was a popular
science article by seth ets Horowitz that came out a

(24:23):
few years back, and he looked into this. I'll included
we'll make sure we include a link to this on
the landing page for this episode, because it's worth checking out.
But he ruled that yes, sufficiently powerful sound waves can
make a human head explode, much like the the Gentleman
on Buffy Um. Because uh infrasound is essentially a hell

(24:44):
of a thing. So if you crank it up to
uh eighteen point ninety eight hurts the same resonance of
the human eye, and the resulting distortions can make you
see weird ghostly shapes. However, if you crank it up
to two forty descibels, you can get the skull to
resonate destructively. Especially it's especially the case if you're using

(25:06):
a debt like a cadaver head. But but this could
conceivably be the case with a living head as well.
To put that in perspective. Low frequency sonar can reach
two hundred and thirty five decibels. And the nineteen o
eight Tunguska event, you know, of course, the Earth object
colliding with the Earth. It's heard around the world, perhaps

(25:27):
the loudest single event in modern history, and it probably
hit three hundred to three D so loud stuff. So
we've never seen anybody's head explode from sound as far
as you know. And I think the way that, the
way that Horowitz explained it is that if you were
setting there, you if you had the technology to do it,

(25:48):
you would still get bored, and you just probably want
to brain the person in the head with the device
you're using. Like it's it's not a bit. There are
far better ways to make a head explode than depending
on sound. Okay. So we've been talking about the idea
of silence as a substance and where you can find it,
and one piece that I came across that I thought
was pretty interesting was a short article in High Country News,

(26:12):
which is a very good magazine focusing on nature in
the American West, uh and it was about places of
quiet in the American wilderness. Now, we often think about
human activity is the primary purveyor of noise, which it
usually is. But leaving the city doesn't always mean heading
to a place of quiet. Of course. I think about
William Butler Yates Lake Isle of innis free. He wants
to get away from the bustle of the city. But

(26:34):
where he's going isn't going to be silent, right, because
he's going to live in the b loud glade. What
a great term. But anyway, you know nature, you hear
the nature sounds, the crickets, the wind, wrestling the leaves.
But even in nature, some places are louder than others.
So at uh that they talked about Idaho's City of
Rocks National Reserve. It's going to be very quiet, but

(26:55):
you'll still probably hear the faint sounds of running water
and wrestling leaves, um and it can get quieter. One
example is Colorado's Great Sand Dunes National Park, which is
very quiet. According to research by the National Park Service.
It's almost as quiet as it was before the European
colonization of America. But like the Antichoic chamber, this level

(27:18):
of silence sort of highlights an underlying lack of silence.
You go into the chamber, and you hear your heartbeat,
your scalp moving, all of that creepy stuff. You apparently
go to Great Sand Dunes National Park and they say
that you hear other sounds from very far away, for example,
the sounds of the Denver International Airport. I did a

(27:41):
quick Google Maps check to see how far away that is,
and it's about two hundred and fifty miles or a
four hour drive. So if this is true, you're you're
hearing planes taking off from two fifty miles away. That's
just crazy. They also put together, the National Park Service
put together on map of America with color coding for

(28:02):
different levels of noise, and so they have these blue
regions where it's very quiet, in these yellow regions where
it's allowed. One thing I noticed is that there's a
very sharp east west divide. The west is much quieter
than the east, and I would say from experience, I
think that's right. Even being in the wilderness, if you

(28:22):
get out of the City's when I noticed. Going to
the wilderness in the east, it's I don't know, you
hear bugs, and you hear wind rustling the leaves and
stuff like that. Probably the quietest place I can ever
remember being was the desert in southwest Texas at Big
Ben National Park, where there was this one day where
I was riding around in a car with my wife

(28:45):
Rachel and her cousin Marie, and one day we we
parked and I went off by myself to hike up
a short little trail, and by myself. At the top
of this trail, I can remember just hearing nothing. I
couldn't hear any water, any insects, any birds, any wind
or leaves. The air was very still. I just heard

(29:05):
this kind of vague whir of things, very distant. And
it's one of the bluest places on the map. Actually, yeah,
I mean it's it's impressive to look one of these maps.
You know where not to move if you are a
Grendel or a granch so like obviously, don't go virtually
anywhere in New England, stay out of the Midwest. Don't

(29:26):
go to Florida. Even the sparsely populated Midwest, it looks
like they're there are a lot of places that are
kind of yellow, and I wonder if that's because of
kind of flat landscape and a lot of highways. You
hear traffic from very far away. Yeah, you pretty much
have to go to the desert. Okay, but I think
we should actually talk about some medical research with reference

(29:46):
to silence and noise. Now everybody knows, of course, that
noise can be really irritating, but I think we don't
often realize the extent to which noise takes a measurable
toll on human on human health, and some people of
actually tried to measure this. For example, I found one
study in the Lancet that said, quote, observational and experimental

(30:09):
studies have shown that noise exposure leads to annoyance, disturbed sleep,
and causes daytime sleepiness, affects patient outcomes and staff performance
in hospitals, increases the occurrence of hypertension and cardiovascular disease,
and impairs cognitive performance in school children. Now, if all
these things were being caused by some food additive or something,

(30:29):
we would be freaking out. Yeah, you know there. I
believe that on the childhood front, there there have been
studies in recent years that have looked into like the
role background music plays and how that can actually that
has a can of a detrimental effect on on On
one hand, I'm just communicating with a kid and like
getting their attention, because even though you're cool with some

(30:52):
ambient music playing in the background and that enhances your
experiences of the scenario, it can be actually kind of
distracting for them. And I believe that it occasionally even
has been shown to to bleed over into language acquisition
to some degree. I don't have the research in front
of me right now, but that's interesting. But even yeah,
but even then, the noise that we take for granted,

(31:13):
the stuff that's not noise, the stuff that weep, the
the adults put on hunt to cancel out the noise,
can itself, um, you know, have a noisome effect. Yeah,
And so when you're exposed to a noise, of course,
this activates a stress response in the brain and goes
to the amygdala, and that triggers there is the release
of stress hormones like cortisol. And of course these hormones

(31:34):
serve a purpose in nature. Right if you you've got
you've got to get ready for a fight, or you've
got to be able to run. But if you've just
got continuously elevated levels of stress hormone being triggered by
noises that have no relevance to you whatsoever, that's not
good for your health, and there's no good reason for it. Yeah,
so we're talking like horns hanking um things out of

(31:56):
the ordinary, things that your mind hasn't had a chance
to sort of program into the north array of sounds
jackhammers on the floor above you in the office. Yeah,
it's weird to think about this because I actually live
next to train tracks and I virtually never hear Like
I hear them all the time, but I almost never
register them, uh, And they never interfere with my in

(32:17):
my sleep or anything, unless there's a sound that happens
that's out of the ordinary, like some sort of occasionally
there's like this huge shuddering um stop to a train
that's making its way through. But other than that, I
legitimately haven't really heard the train in a distractive manner
since the day I moved into the house. Well, there's

(32:38):
one thing I would say is that you might not
even be aware of the extent to which it is
disturbing your sleep, because noise disturbance of sleep is a
major factor in these health outcomes. In fact, in two
thousand and eleven, the World Health Organization, they put together
this big report and they were collecting evidence on the
public health risks posed by noise and your Uropean Union

(33:00):
member states, and they actually put numbers on it. They
tried to take what we know and make some estimates
of what the total effects are. And of course what
they were calculating this in was something called dailies or
disability adjusted life years. So how many healthy years is
this issue taking off of people's lives. You can measure

(33:21):
a lot of negative health factors that way, and they said, quote,
with conservative assumptions applied to the calculation methods, it's estimated
that uh daily is lost from environmental noise are sixty
one thousand years for heart disease, forty five thousand years
for cognitive impairment of children, nine hundred and three thousand

(33:43):
years for sleep disturbance, twenty two thousand years for tenadives,
six hundred and fifty four thousand years for annoyance. In
the European Union member states, the results indicate that at
least one million healthy life years are lost every year
from traffic related and noise in the western part of Europe. Well,
that's the good thing I turned on that white noise

(34:04):
in the evening. That does bring something up. I want
to keep thinking about throughout this episode, is white noise
the same as silence? Like, what really is silence? If
we've established this principle where you go into the antichotic
chamber and there's silence, and that just means that you
notice your heartbeat, and you notice the you know, the

(34:24):
creepy scalp. You go to a national park in Colorado
and you notice planes taking off hundreds of miles away.
You're always digging deeper into the background sound palette. And
so if that's the case, what is silence? Is there
actually such an experience as silence? Well as far as

(34:46):
white noise machines go. I feel like in a way
that the use of colors is kind of telling. Now
specifically I use a brown noise. Yes, that's my favorite setting.
It's a good one. Yeah, And it's hard not to
think of it in terms of of of say a
wall that was once white. So like, all right, it's
got some smears on it, it's got some scuffs. I

(35:07):
could try and clean it down, I could try and
go back to that that that white level. I could
try and suscribe everything away and get to some level
of silence. But I'm better off just putting up a
wall of sound and just make just painting the wall Brown.
I'm sorry, I'm mixing my metaphors here, but I don't
see what you're saying. A new um and a new
seamless sound. Uh, you know, base level of noise that

(35:30):
has no no variety. They're not going to be any sudden,
you know, goblin cackles or anything. Yeah, quiet, predictable sound
you can tune out and register is silence. Real silence
is hard to tune out because you're constantly hearing tiny variations. Yeah,
I don't want to hear all the little noises that
mightn't happen during the night. I don't want to. I

(35:50):
certainly don't want to hear anything the cats up to.
So I would rather just just go ahead and put
up this wall of sound. I don't want to hear
the kind of research on how to take your soul.
It's going through those books of the occult you got.
You know, you shouldn't have bought those, I know, especially
the ones written in cat So Robert. One of the

(36:11):
things that actually inspired me to do this episode was
it was an article I read from Nautilus that was
a July piece in Nautilus by Daniel A. Gross called
This is Your Brain on Silence, and this actually turned
me onto a few more avenues of of inquiry that
I want to talk about now. So in Gross's piece
he mentions a few studies, and one of them is

(36:32):
this two thousand six study in the journal Heart by
a scientist named lu Luciano Bernardi and colleagues. And it's
called Cardiovascular, cerebro vascular and Respiratory changes induced by different
types of music in musicians and non musicians. The importance
of silence long name, But the interesting takeaway from this

(36:54):
is that they were intending to study physiological effects of
different types of music. This sounds like pretty standard research, right.
So they hook you up to some machines and they
want to play I don't know exactly what different music
they played, probably some probably some metal, probably some classical.
They played exciting music, arousing music, relaxing music, and they
measured things about your body respirations, is still blood pressure,

(37:17):
circulation in the brain, and they were trying to figure out,
you know, do different types of music change these things? Now,
of course they did. Different types of music did indeed
lead to different states of arousal and cause physiological changes.
But Bernardi and colleagues found that the most drastic changes
and the most interesting changes happened when random two minute

(37:39):
intervals of silence were introduced as a control to the tests.
So these periods of silence had a physiologically miserable effect
of calming and relaxation, more so than the relaxing, calming
music that they were attempting to test. So this is
kind of like if you went to a fancy restaurant
or a wine tasting and the best part of your

(38:00):
experience was the palette cleanser between courses, you know, the
crackers or the sorbet or whatever. Is that that that
actually does more for you than anything else. It's like
that wonderful scene in Putti tang Um Yes, which which
I always have enjoyed as I think it's a I
think it's a fine movie. It's a great science fiction film.
But there's a scene where where Potty Tang the the

(38:22):
the the the title character, who is himself an accomplished
musician and just sort of cultural phenomenon um. He goes
around winner, yeah, just all around winner. He goes in
and he's gonna cut this new track. He's gonna drop
this new track and he gets the the sound engineer
to just bring all the levels down and he passionately

(38:42):
performs the track of pure silence and and it becomes
a sensation. And I think it's kind of a beautiful
idea that it's like in this in in an in
an age where like it's all about like the noise
that the music, that the constant music on top of
all the sounds around us. That an actual silence, some
force meditation and maybe even like essentially a two minute

(39:04):
interval of silence enforced on everyone would have a profound impact. Well, yeah,
it's POUTI tang spin on the the original work of
the composer John Cage, Right, So John Cage would do
these experimental music things where you know, you might be
just like random turned on radios or complete silence or
something like that. And it's it's easy to make jokes

(39:26):
about that. You know, you go to a classical music
concert and sit there while a pianist sits in front
of a piano and she doesn't play anything. That that's funny,
but it's also yeah, I can see the artistic merit
in that causing people to notice other sounds in the room,
to notice what the experience of listening is like by
not having anything to listen to. But again it's also

(39:49):
easy to make fun of another interesting fact here about
the study. So found these periods of silence more relaxing
than the relaxing music. The relaxing effect of the silence
was more pronounced in these short intervals between music than
it was in a long period of silence before the

(40:12):
test started. So, in other words, the most profound effect
of silence seemed to be when it occurred in contrast,
And this is a quote from Gross's article that that
is quoting Bernardi that the author of the study gives
to the author of the article quote, perhaps the arousal
is something that concentrates the mind in one direction, so
that when there's nothing more arousing, then you have deeper relaxation,

(40:37):
so you're focused on something and then you take a break,
which is much more relaxing than doing nothing in the
first place. Well, certainly, I can think I don't know
how closely related this is, but you can think of
of moments in modern music and older music where you
have that that full stop where everything goes silent for

(40:58):
a second and then the sound comes back right before
they drop with the drop, right, yeah, like the drop,
the dubstep drop, or even of course, um, what was
it that the Beatles song with the famous drop. I'm
not sure which in the life, right is that the one?
Oh I know that song, but I can't remember if
there's a drop in it where there's like that, everything

(41:21):
gets very loud and then suddenly silence. Our Beatles fans
will have to correct man that one if I'm wrong.
But but certainly their example of this throughout music the
drop totally well, I mean it does focus the mind.
The rests are as important as the beats. But of course,
the finding that the brain responds mainly to contrast and

(41:43):
change is borne out by other research research in mice.
So here's one interesting one that is also cited in
the Nautilus piece. Back in two thousand ten at the
University of Oregon, there was this interesting finding about how
the brain reacts to silence. So the interesting fact is
that the brain processes silence is a distinct type of

(42:05):
input apart from sound. Remember we were talking about silence
as a substance, so the brain sees it as such too. Yeah,
the brain very much treats silence as a substance rather
than just the absence of noise. So the researchers monitored
the brains of rats exposed to bursts of sound and
charted the brain activity for when sounds began and when

(42:25):
sounds ended. And what they found was that rats used
two completely separate synaptic pathways for processing these types of sensation.
So you hear a new sound, sound comes on, the
brain does one thing, sound goes off. The brains goes
a completely different synaptic route to the auditory cortex. Something
that it's it's doing a different kind of processing. And

(42:49):
the first thing to notice is, of course this is
necessary for the understanding of speech. When you're listening to
somebody talk, how do you tell when one word ends
and another begins in spoken communicityation? You have to hear
the spaces, and that's not so easy to do. It's
not easy to get computers to do this right, because certainly,
if you hear yourself talk, you hear other people talk

(43:10):
uh to varying degrees depending on who's doing the during
the talking. Yeah, though, the spaces between the words become
almost microscopic. Yeah. And then of course this is also
a survival mechanism. Have you ever thought about how unnerving
it is to hear a sudden silence. Yes, I have, Joe,

(43:34):
So yeah, Fear is an adaptive mechanism, right. It triggers
these survival behaviors. You've got a robot assassin coming at you,
it's turning on its mini gun, wearing up and uh,
and it triggers these survival behaviors. In dangerous situations, you've
got an impulse to freeze and be quiet, or the
body prepares itself to flee or or to fight for survival. Though,

(43:57):
I mean, if it's the robot with the mini gun,
you don't have much of a good ants. But so,
how do animals know when to be afraid? Well, decent question,
and certainly one clue is if something has alerted other
animals in their presence, right that if something has caused
a quiet to spread amongst the surrounding organisms. Right. And

(44:19):
the question is is that sort of a universal language
and instinctual universal language among animals, And it looks like
it might be. So. One way of course animals can
be afraid is learned fear associations. If every time you
go to the red food bowl it shocks you, you're
going to be afraid of the red food bowl. There's
also instinctual, species specific triggers of fear, like audible alarm

(44:41):
calls or pheromones. But there was a study in two
thousand twelve in Current Biology called silence resulting from the
cessation of movement signals danger. And what this study found
is that the other animal fear trigger is silence, specifically
the sudden cessation of the sound of movement. You here, walking, talking, here,

(45:02):
moving along through the brush. When whenever that goes quiet,
animals instinctively become afraid. They know something's wrong. Uh. And
the author's right in their abstract quote as freezing is
a pervasive fear response in animals. Silence may constitute a
truly public queue used by a variety of animals in
the ecosystem to detect impending danger. So this is interesting

(45:25):
that it becomes across species language like you're you're not.
You don't have to listen to your own co species,
you know calling out, be careful when you hear the
birds becoming quiet, you know something's up, even if you
are an escaped monkey from a from a lab, even
if you are even if you're a wolverine. But then

(45:49):
to come back on the other side, there is another
biological role that silence seems to play, and it's a
positive nurturing one toward brain development. So there's study by M. K.
Kirsty in Brain structure and function called is silence Golden
effects of auditory stimuli and their absence on adult hippocamp

(46:10):
ll neurogenesis. So this essentially linked silence to brain development.
And they tested four different sound conditions, which was so
they had some mice and they tested standard background noise
and an animal testing facility that sounds like a really
pleasant noise. But then they also compared this to white
noise that they might have gone with brown noise, but

(46:32):
they didn't white noise the pup calls of mice, so
you know, a little little mice calling out for the
parents and silence. And the hypothesis going into this experiment
was that the baby mouse calls, the pup calls would
stimulate the growth of new brain cells in adults. And
at first, all of the sounds except the white noise,
did seem to encourage one specific type of brain cell

(46:55):
growth neurogenesis in the hippocampus, but after seven days only
silence was still associated with this brain cell growth and
that was a total surprise. But the authors write, quote,
our results indicate that the unnatural absence of auditory inputs,
as well as spectro temporally rich albeit ethologically irrelevant stimuli,

(47:18):
activate precursor cells in the case of silence, also leading
to greater numbers of newborn immature neurons, whereas ambient and
unstructured background auditory stimuli do not. So. In other words,
the theory is that artificial silence presents a healthy challenge
to the brain, which prompts the brain to grow new
brain cells in adaptation more so than any of these

(47:42):
other background noises. It's interesting when you when need when
you take that into account thinking about our own Like,
so you're driving along in the car and he might think, oh,
I need something to occupy my mind. Right, so I'm
gonna put on some music and put on some podcast
or what have you. Um, But really your mind is
gonna be able to occupy itself. Maybe, but again, perhaps

(48:05):
that's part of the problem. You want you it's going
to occupy itself, But maybe that's part of the problem. Well,
it might just occupy itself with obsession over your own
mortality or with other things that you just don't have
time for. Yeah, the basic default mode network. Right, So
this really complex picture of silence is emerging. For me.
The substance of silence is is strange because uh, it's

(48:29):
freedom from noise. Of course, it seems to promote relaxation,
We've seen that. But then you go into an intensely
quiet room, we become aware of deeper and deeper noises,
deeper into the quiet verse, and you start to go crazy.
People lose their minds, they can't stand it. And then
periods of silence seem to promote healthy growth of brain cells,
seems to be good for at least the brains of mice. Um.

(48:51):
But then the sudden silence also triggers fear and alarm.
So it seems our reactions to silence are almost as
complex as our reactions to sound itself, which makes me
wonder is there really such a thing as silence? And
if so, what is the ideal quiet? What are we
really going for when we want some peace and quiet?

(49:11):
What is it we have in mind? M hm, Well,
I feel like this is um. This is a question
that is complicated by just the human experience of silence.
For you know, for one, thing, because when I'm engaging
with with actual silence, I'm also very engaging to varying

(49:33):
degrees with inner silence and weighing those two. And then
if that's going to color my memory about how quiet
a particular setting was, you know, like if I like
I've gone places before, like when I had to think
of for this podcast, like what are the quietest places
I've been to? I can the places that come to

(49:53):
mind are like wilderness environments. They were not necessarily quiet.
Like one was, like um, up on top of a
mountain in Yosemite, and there weren't any human noises around
me other than like I think I was, I was
pretty worn out by the time I reached the top. Uh.
But you know that the wind was sweeping through, blowing

(50:14):
across the trees and the and the rocks. Uh that
there was a sound of of loose rocks underfoot as
I ascended. But yet you know, part of part of
it was probably physical exertion. Part of it was just
the you know, an entirely new physical environment, a slightly
different you know, sound environment. Like all of that further

(50:38):
colored my interpretation of it as quiet. You know, so
when I look back on it, now I'm it's easy
for me to say, oh, that was one of the
quietest places I've been to. But in a way it
was just loud in different ways, both sonically and like
just visually loud. I thought the same thing. I mean,
I was able to think of Big Bend, which was actually,
I think, relatively quiet. But when I when I think

(51:01):
of quiet places, I just think of like nature and
stuff like that. It's not quiet at all. There's bugs everywhere.
I was up in Tennessee last weekend, sitting out on
the porch one night, and I was thinking, Man, it's
so nice and quiet out here. It was not even
remotely quote. It was incredibly loud with different like the Uh.
It's like a it's like a Phil Specter wall of sound,

(51:24):
engineered entirely by bugs. They're filling in every single conceivable
hole where there could be a noise. They've all got
their niche and it's all there. It's like a it's
like a like a Queen metal song, you know where
they it's just floor to ceiling. Oh yeah. I camped
in okay Finoki swamp here in Georgia several years back

(51:46):
when on a canoe trip. UH, and it was legitimately
hard to sleep that night because the insects were so
loud and the frogs frogs, like actually underneath the platform
that we had our tents set up on, we're just
so incredibly out. It was. It was worse than trying
to sleep in a city. But but in my memory
I interpreted this as peace and quiet. Yeah, in in

(52:09):
a sense it is. But it's but again that that
kind of that that's why it's so complicated to try
and think, like, well, what's what's my ideal level of silence,
because you know what, a doctor's waiting room can be
pretty quiet. But oh, that's no good at all. Yeah,
but it's not good because you're about to go and
see the doctor. Your head is probably more alive with
with worry and concerns and what ifs than uh than

(52:32):
any other time. I mean, I'm I wonder what it
would be like to find it soothing to sit in
a silent room and hear nothing but the sound of
a pencil scraping against paper as it describes the shape
of a mole. Yeah. Um, you know, it also makes
me think of airports we mentioned, you know earlier in
um in jest. But of course he created music for airports.

(52:53):
That's wonderful ambient album. And every time I listened to it,
or and or every time I'm in an actual report,
I think, why am I listening to CNN on several
different TVs on top of all the noise instead of
music for airports? Is is there an idea here that
actually more distraction? Is is better? Like that is the

(53:14):
form of silence that works better in an airport as
opposed to the the the the idea of silence, uh
in the midst of ambient music. I don't know. I
don't know either. Or should we just all have, you know,
our our heads encased in some sort of sarcophagus to
enforce silence upon us. Well, that's another thing. Even even

(53:39):
if you put in ear plugs and you you know,
very good ones, and you don't hear what's going on
around you, there is still a sort of connected sense
of touch, you know, the vibrational energy. There's some sort
of blending between our sense of touch and our sense
of hearing. Yeah, yeah, and certainly you're still going to
receive those uh, those waves you're certainly gonna hear with
your skull um to a large degree. So yeah, you're

(54:01):
not gonna be able to to to completely silence it out.
So Robert, here's something that I read about when I was,
you know, doing some browsing on the subject of silence.
The idea of enforced silence. It's a hard thing to
pull off, right, because you can isolate somebody, you can
put them in solitary, you can go, uh, you know,

(54:21):
cold War John C. Lily, and drop somebody in an
isolation tank. But for the most partly, people have a
right to be loud, and people can be loud outwardly
and certainly inwardly. You know, I don't usually think of
a prison as a place that's going to be, especially
a refuge of peace and quiet. But in the nineteenth
century there was this regime that I read about known

(54:44):
as the Auburn system. It evolved in the Auburn Prison
of Auburn, New York. And the way this worked is
that you had prisoners whould go out perform hard labor
all day, and then they were put in solitary confinement
at night with enforced silence at all time, no talking.
Well that sounds absolutely dreadful, absolutely shredful. Well, anyway, the idea,

(55:08):
I guess is that, you know, criminals, they learn habits,
they learn things from each other, They learn and reinforce
bad behaviors from other criminals through some sort of perverted
form of social education. But if the prisoners can't make
a sound, they can't communicate with one another in order
to reinforce and instruct. But I'm curious how, I mean,

(55:30):
not like I think it would be ethical to do
this in any case, but putting questions of ethicality aside,
did this work? Did people really find that this increased
penitence caused people to stop living a criminal lifestyle? I
I am almost positive that this did not. My bat
is that this did not work, though it does sound like,

(55:52):
you know, perfectly deplorable from you know, by nineteenth century
penal standards. I mean, I think I think it's of
fits with the idea of you know what, do you need? Nothing?
You need? You need your Bible and you need quiet reflection,
and so they put you in a room by yourself,
no talking, read your Bible and that's it. And I

(56:13):
guess it was supposed to encourage guilt, you know, guilt
and remorse and feelings of wanting to reform. But I
don't know. I think when you force people to be silent,
do you also encourage them to stew on what bothers them? Well,
I think yeah, I mean it's you're not necessarily making

(56:33):
any positive movement there. I mean, in researching this episode,
it did a lot of searches around for silence related
UM studies, and silence can have many meanings. Of course,
as we've already discussed, one meaning we haven't really gotten
into is silence in terms of not talking about your problems,
not talking about what's botting, You're not talking about an issue. Well,

(56:55):
that's another You've done an episode of this show before.
It was also several years ago in the Spiral Silence,
which is not not so much about sound but just
about not speaking up right, And yeah, that that becomes
an echo chamber of its own. Um. But I mean,
on top of that, of course, the all of the

(57:15):
research indicates that solitary confinement is just a brutal tactic
to use against anybody. So I think it is it
is now coming to be considered a form of torture,
so I'd be willing to look into it more. But
I my my firm suspicion is that this, uh, this
prison experiment like so like pretty much anything you call
a prison experience probably did not have great, great outcome. Now,

(57:41):
of course, that's when silence is imposed upon you, inflicted
upon you. But but certainly there there are plenty of
models for embracing silence, taking on vowels of silence. Certainly,
um there a number of monastic traditions and the Catholic
tradition that come to mind. Uh. It Also, silence also
plays a role in Hindu philosophy, where it is uh mauna. Also,

(58:05):
even the Greek philosopher of Pathagoras of say most imposed
a rule of silence on his uh disciples of pythagoraean
silence stince of five years or more, even to prove
your commitment apparently, oh man, Yeah, the music of the
spheres you can't hear it unless you stop talking. Yeah,
And then of course there's the whole issue of silence.

(58:26):
Uh in the world place silence in steady, you know
here and how stuff works over over the years, I've
seen I've seen this this transformation. So like when I
first started here, like eight or nine years ago, we
had these bit and you were here at the at
the time. We had these big but six years Yeah,
it was still in the same office, so it was

(58:47):
like sort of big three sided cubicles, really spacious. Uh.
You felt like a monk in um in the library
at times. You know, you're able to get your materials,
you had your computer and you are working away on
your on your own. There were days where you didn't
you didn't necessarily see anybody that was seated on an
opposite row from you. And uh, We've had a couple

(59:10):
of different offices since then, and things have gotten more
open office, as is the trend right where the ideas that, oh,
we're going to treat treat everything like it's a newsroom,
treat everything, uh in a way so that we're inspiring
all sorts of uh, you know, vital and imaginative, creative
energies that will just free flow and ricochet around the office. Man,

(59:31):
there is nothing more inspiring than overhearing somebody else's work conversation. Yeah, um,
you know. And I feel like there are there are
professions where an opus opened the office environment work better
their individuals for whom it works better. Um. I think
the problem is always when you try applying any kind

(59:52):
of one size fits all um plan to a workforce, well,
it seems to be from what I've read, everything is
open office now. It's what everybody does. I'm not quite
sure why that trend has caught on, but but it's
not just it's not just here in the work world.
I mean you also see it out in the world
of scientific research. In fact, there have there have been

(01:00:14):
some papers in recent years so they've brought this up
saying that hey, we have too much enforced interaction in
science UM. In fact, Peter Higgs has stated that the
Higgs Boson of the Higgs Boson has stated that the
peace and quiet that he was afforded in the nineteen sixties,
which resulted in his Nobel Prize winning work, is no

(01:00:34):
longer possible, you know. So you have you have a
number of scientists over the years who have really been
UM proponents of silence. Newton, Einstein, just just to name
a few here. They've all prized silence and isolation. And
if they were working today, would they have it? And
if they didn't have it, would they have been able
to achieve the ends that they that they achieved in

(01:00:57):
their lives. Well, not to mention how much they'd be
required or to tweet about their ongoing research and upcoming conferences.
I'll do that Facebook Live. Make sure Newton that you
do your Facebook life. You gotta understand you're gonna do
something with an apple, um where you have a dog
door something. Let's get some let's point some some cameras
of that. Facebook wants to know what is this? Yes?

(01:01:20):
Why am I seeing this? Who? Who are you? Uh? Well,
it's the world. It's the world we have. It's the
world we have to deal with, and we'll we'll find
a way to work through the noise. I mean that's
a scenario at any point, right right, No, no matter
how noise do you think the world is. No matter
how quiet a slice you've carved out for yourself, you're

(01:01:41):
still going to have to work through the noise. Well,
I mean that brings us back to the to the question.
I guess the core question the substance of silence. What
is it? And why is some silence desirable but other
silence is not? So you might put in this loud
white noise track at work in order to get some
quiet from the conversations that are going on around you.

(01:02:04):
So you're increasing the volume in order to get some
peace and quiet. The signals again that that is clearly
about something about the the introduction and novelty of sound
rather than the volume of sound. Yeah, I guess I'd
be tempted to think of it as oxygen, you know,
And like I might want to take a breath of
pure oxygen every now and then, But I don't fun

(01:02:27):
just for fun. But I don't want to necessarily live
in an environment of pure oxygen and breathe it all
the time. That would kill you. But but but every
now and then I'll sleep in my specialized oxygen tent.
Uh and uh, and it will revitalize me. But hey,
that's uh, that's our take on the topic. We we
put it to you, though, what is the quietest place

(01:02:50):
you have ever found yourself in? What what's the quietest
place you've visited? What is the quietest place you have
created for yourself in your own life? And I guess
the question is a dual question, right, what's the place
that has felt the most quiet to you, like the
ideal mind silence versus what's actually the lowest number of
ambient decibels? Be very interested to hear, Hey, maybe you've

(01:03:13):
even been to one of these uh, these soundless chambers
that we've created in the world. I want to hear
from the people, and I know they've got to be
out there, the people who went in one and did
not get all freaked out, because I'm sure there are
some people. I'm sure we hear about the ones that
get freaked out. Have you been to one of these
things and didn't really bother you? I want to hear
about that. I mean, there are people who who are

(01:03:35):
noisy enough and or make enough noises just moving around
that I think they would they would fare just fine,
like they would never notice. They're just if you're just
sitting there like groaning to yourself and cracking your knuckles
and talking to yourself and groaning some more than you know,
you're probably not gonna notice. The test about how we'll
show all them, show all they're griping about your office

(01:03:59):
environment all that. Let's stop being grumpy, Robert, how can
they get in touch with us? Oh? Hey, before we
do that, we should also mention that this week we
are going to be in New York. That's right. If
you were in New York, specifically, if you were attending
the The Star Trek Mission New York uh CON in
New York City, then you should you should check us out.

(01:04:22):
We're gonna be there. We're gonna be doing a presentation.
It's gonna be Star Trek e. It's gonna be science,
it's gonna be a little cosmic, it's gonna be a
little uh psychological. Yeah. So the conference goes from September
two to September four. If if you're gonna be there,
our panel will be on Friday afternoon, in the early afternoon,
and you can look us up in the conference materials.
But yeah, so if if you're around, come say hi, yeah, yeah,

(01:04:44):
come here what we have to say, and then uh
have a little chat with us afterwards. And in the meantime,
head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That's where you'll find all the podcast, the videos, blog
post links out to our various social media accounts, uh
and that Facebook account Blow the Mind. You will definitely
find information there about the upcoming Star Trek thing. And

(01:05:06):
if you want to get in touch with us, as always,
you can email us and blow the mind at how
stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Is that how stuff Works dot com.

(01:05:31):
Bl