June 12, 2013 • 34 mins
The Quietest Room in the World: In Minneapolis, MN there's a room that blocks 99.99 percent of all sound. It's a place of intense silence, intense calm and possibly intense madness. What happens when things are too quite? Robert and Julie explore in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
This is Robert Lamb, and you're whispering, I guests in
an attempt to be to be quiet, because we're we're
in a sort of quiet room. Um it's it's padded though.
(00:27):
On the other side of the padding there are windows
I can't move my own, and then the other side
of the windows there is a train and traffic and
occasionally helicopters and sirens, uh, birds slamming into the glass,
all that sort of fun stuff. So occasionally we have
to take breaks here as we record for outside sounds,
but we attempt to to keep the sound of the
(00:49):
world at bay with all of us padding right, and
also by keeping our volume up. When you whisper like that,
you're actually doing us a disservice because we as we'll
discussing this podcast. The quieter it gets, the more you hear,
so I really get your attention. Yeah, well, well, let's
let's be quiet for a second. Let's see if they
can hear the ambient sounds of the studio. Terrifying, isn't it?
(01:11):
It kind of is. Actually, I don't know if you
guys can pick that up. Probably not, but it does
have kind of like a two thousand and one sound
to it, just sort of the void but something there. Um. Yeah,
so we are. We're taking on the subject of quietude,
and we're taking on the subject through a vehicle called
literally the Quietest Room in the World. Yes, Now, the
(01:33):
subject of quiet, the sound of silence and all that
reminds me a lot of some of what we touched
on in our older episode, um splendid isolation. We're talking
about isolation to a certain extent century deprivation and uh
and loneliness, and talking about how for a lot of
us we have this weird thing where, you know, we
we want isolation, we want to move away from people.
(01:56):
But then if but we if we get too much
of that, it's not we're not We're gonna go past
the beneficial stage of of isolation and we're going to
get into the harmful levels of it. And likewise, with
quiet we see a similar thing. I think more and
more we live in noisy, busy lives. You know, the
world is full of sound, The world is full of
(02:17):
of movement and energy, and for a lot of us
that comes a point where you just want to be
in a place where there is no sounds. You want
to find that monastery on a hill, you want to
find that secret library, that secret garden, and just get
away from it and shut it all off. And and
it's I think it's important to to have that in
some way, shape or form. But then what happens if
(02:38):
you do enter a place that is so quiet that
there is there is there's almost no sound at all,
Then what can that do to It's horrifying to the brain. Really,
it's inconceivable because the brain is not the we we
don't have monastery brains. We have we have, you know,
busy city brains. We have a chirping bird brains. We
(02:58):
have brains that need various bits of input coming in
and giving us a changing, constantly altering view of the world.
But if the view of the world is just nothing,
then things can get out of hand well. And and
human hearing is certainly part of this something of the world. Right.
There's a great article by George Mitchelson Foy called Shut
(03:19):
Up and Listen from Psychology Today, and he talks about
human hearing is being a beautiful sensitive system of organic microphones,
signal processors, amplifiers like your home stereo, only better. And
what happens when you switch on your home stereo, well,
it gives off a very faint hum. The same is
true of your hearing apparatus. Like any sound system, it
generates its own little hum when working. And so this
(03:43):
is sort of a natural state of of ourselves and
our beings and the our machinery. We just don't think
about it. We think about when we want to, you know,
do a foreshutdown of our brain or um enter into
this silence, this quietude, that it should all be absolute
sign lens. But it cannot be right because inevitably, you
you just hear the sound of your hearing. You'll hear
(04:06):
the sound of your your blood circulating, of your heart beating,
of your own breathing, just kind of the stillness of
the air almost and you know, the quieter it gets,
the more your ears listen. Yeah, I wanted to mention
if you guys will indulge me for a second um
our tone map in our ears, because I think this
is really interesting because we usually think, okay, well, we
(04:26):
you know, we take in sound and it vibrates our
ear and it goes to the middle ear and so
want to sit with the ricochet's Well, we know, we
all know sort of the basics of that. So beyond
you know, making our ear drums vibrate, there's a lot
going on. These vibrations cause nerve hairs in the inner
ear to shiver and that triggers electric signals that travel
along the auditory nerve into the brain. And then one
(04:48):
of the first stops is a patch of gray matter
called the auditory cortex. Now this is where everything happens.
We usually think that, uh, noise happens, or the perception
of it happens in the inner ear, but it's the
auditory cortex in our brain. And each nerve is tuned
to a particular frequency of sound and excites only certain
neurons in the auditory cortex. And then as a result,
(05:11):
the neurons in the auditory cortex form what is known
as a tone map, and the neurons at one end
of the auditory cortex are tuned to low frequencies, and
the farther you go towards the other end, the higher
the tuning of the neurons. So the auditory cortex you
can almost think of it as a musical instrument. Uh,
and it is the musical instrument is played upon by
(05:32):
these electrical impulses. Yeah, exactly, and it's it's a it's
like an elaborate feedback system too, because the neurons do
more than just relay signals forward into the brain. They
also signal back down the line, and they reached to
neighboring neurons that are tuned to nearby frequency, exciting some
and then muzzling others. It sort of reminded me of
(05:53):
when we were talking about memory last week, about how
you know, with memory, you have certain neurons, excited clusters
that are rising up and tamping down other competing neurons
to bring a memory forward. It's a little bit similar
to the way that we're perceiving sound and processing it. Right,
You've got these excited neurons that are making their way
(06:15):
and sort of crossing with other frequencies. And so these
are kind of like feedback controls, and they allow us
to sift through those incoming sounds and figure out the
most important information and how to make sense of them
without being drowned out by all the other meaning less
noise around us. All right, well, we're gonna take a
quick breaking when we come back, we will enter the
quietest room in the world. All right, we're back, and U.
(06:46):
We've talked about sound. We've talked about how it enters
the brain, how we perceive it, how it contributes our
understanding of the world, and uh, we've touched on how
when we begin to to crank down the sound in
our life, we begin to hear more of the noises
that are off hidden um even when the speaker, to
your point, even when the speaker is not playing, there
is a humming and we don't notice the humming when
the speaker is blaring some music at us. But when
(07:09):
the speaker is on but silent, it's not really silent.
You've got that feedback system exactly. So if we were
to travel to or Field Laboratories in Minneapolis, we would
find a room that blocks all sound. That's right, and
let's enter this chamber. In order to enter this chamber,
(07:29):
which is also called an ana coic chamber, we must
pass through two vaults to get into it. And it
is a room that is so soundproof it is officially
listed as the quietest place on earth. This is according
to the Guinness World Records. They wouldn't lie because they
keep me updated on how many eggs people can eat
and who's the fattest. So that's what they do. Many
(07:50):
take names and they tabulate all this stuff. The room
is used sometimes for technical analysis, for example company companies
testing out the sound of a switch or a dial
or some other mechanical component. In fact, past clients have
included Whirlpool and Hardley Davidson, which used the chamber in
an effort to produce quieter motorcycles. They want quieter motorcycles. Yeah,
(08:11):
we've never know in Atlanta because it's just it's like
packs and packs of crazy lad motorcycles. But it is
also used. This room is also used as a cycle
psychological chamber of will. Yes, so how's it constructed? What
is made? What is it made of? How do you
make a room that is so devoid of sound? Because
clearly we're not in one right now, um, and we
(08:32):
take quite a lot of work to really get that
kind of soundless. Uh. Construction for starters, the chamber features
three point three ft thick fiberglass acoustic wedges, double walls
of insulated steel and foot thick concrete. And again this
enables it to be ninety sound absorbent with a decibel
rating of negative nine point four d b a. So
(08:54):
any sounds below the threshold of zero d b a
is undetectable by the human ear. It's true. Like so
it's virtually like zero sound being, you know, bounced off
the walls here. And that's what's so interesting here too,
is that it is under the radar of human sound.
As you say, minus night point nine point four deciples
we hear at zero and above. So what happens here,
(09:18):
that's where the psychological will UH chamber will comes into play.
What happens here is that people go a little bit
nuts because it's quiet, yeah, like crazy quiet. There's a
mesh floor in the ceiling, and as you mentioned, you
have that meter along fiberglass acoustic wedge in there. So
what happens when you put a human being in there, well,
they become disoriented or they even experienced hallucinations because after
(09:43):
a few minutes, UH founder Stephen Orfield told the Daily
Mailie says, your body begins to adapt to the soundlessness,
picking up smaller and smaller sounds. You'll hear your heart beating. Sometimes,
you can hear your lungs, your stomach gurgling loudly, and
then in the antichoic chamber, you become the sound. So
(10:04):
all of this becomes really disorienting in space and time.
In fact, there's a chair in there for the sole
purpose of allowing people to try to figure out their
place in space and time because they don't have the
I would hope, wouldn't that be the worst. But the
idea is that we we don't think about it, but
the vibrations around us and kind of give us these
(10:25):
auditory cues about where things are in space and time.
And if you don't really have that, then you begin
to feel as though you're sort of unmoored from your reality.
And it turns out that people who are in there
for more than thirty minutes have to sit down, and
the longest that anybody has ever made it in there
is forty five minutes. Wow. Because yeah, after a while,
you begin to you begin to hear more and more
of these real sounds as you mentioned, but then you
(10:47):
inevitably can end up hearing these unreal sounds as well.
Audible hallucinations can exactly. Yeah, you've got that tone map
kind of going nuts with what it does and doesn't
have available to it, and it starts filling in the blanks.
Y you had mentioned in the last podcast, there's a
two thousand and nine study that shows that in another chamber,
that's just fifteen minutes before people have started to hallucinate
(11:08):
one way or another. Because again, our brains have not
involved to live in a world of such silence. We
we we've evolved to live in a world full of sounds,
sounds that our brain has to decipher in order to
navigate our way safely through it. And so at this point,
our brain is saying, I don't know, man, it's all
quiet there. Let's let's listen harder, Let's listen, har Let's
fill in the blanks, because there might be something out
(11:30):
there that could kill us, something out there that could
sustain us, and we need to know where everything is, right,
I mean, we we are built for sound, and and
to take that away is to really scramble the brain
into the brain to actually lose some of its purpose. Right, Um,
You will not be surprised that NASA has also used
the room. Yes, and of course they've ratcheted up the
(11:50):
sensory deprivation levels by of course putting a water filled
tank in the room for astronauts to plunge into just
to make it a little bit more intent and to
figure out how long it takes before hallucinations start to
set in. Yeah, because we've mentioned in a previous episode
the you know, what is a spaceship, what is a
what is a space station? But a form of sensory deprivation.
(12:12):
It is at the very least, um just a portion
of our natural environment that is completely cut off, like
an on a planetary scale from where we're supposed to
live and there so that you're can be isolated from
outside sounds. Uh, sound is going to travel a little
differently inside the capsule. It's just going to be a
totally different experience. So the more we know about how
this affects the human body and how we can uh
(12:35):
roll with the with the effects and and also limit
the detrimental effects, all the better. And the more that
Commander Chris Hadfield can post those awesome videos right first
Ultimate Joy, Yeah, it makes more. You know, it's like,
of course you let the man bring a guitar up
there and cut a music video because uh, you know,
aside from being very educational and really you know, really
(12:56):
overall just really great for the space program. Although the
videos he was doing up there, and and also the
fun stuff, but also it keeps somebody from going nuts.
It would have been a totally different YouTube series if
he had just been going gradually insane from hearing no
sound in thember, right exactly. You know, among the many
detrimental effects of of exposure to such prolonged and ponderous silence,
(13:20):
um is a spontaneous tonitis. That's right, because it's it's
believed to be a response of the auditory cortex, which
we talked about to the abnormal absence of all ambient sounds,
and we really started to think about this. Tonita is
sometimes called tenatus. I believe that either way is correct,
but we began to think about this. This really is
(13:42):
the opposite of silence or what we think about silence,
because it's often called this sort of low ringing of
the ears or this humming sound, and a lot of
people are affected by it. And in fact, one of
our listeners, Aaron, actually emailed us about it when we
were talking about different topic emotions and outer space, and
(14:02):
let me just read a quick excerpt of that. He says, funny,
you should happen to mention my tonitis request at the
end of today's Emotions and Outer Space episode. Because as
you guys were discussing how maddening the idea of a
completely silent room would be, I was just thinking to myself,
Holy crap, you have no idea, speaking of which, because
he has tenitus, of course, Speaking of which, here's an
(14:23):
MP three I made a while back which simulates, to
the best of garage bands ability, what my tonitis sounds like.
For the most convincing effect, play it in a quiet
room at a level just above that of whisper enjoy
you won't um. So we're gonna have a quick clip
of that so that everybody can kind of understand what
we're talking about when we talk about tonitus. Yeah, so
(14:48):
that I can see where that would that would get
a little old really fast, right. Yeah. Now, it's it's
worth pointing out that that about one in five people
experience this, and the the the way that the noise
is described by people who who experienced it, it ranges
from a ringing to a buzzing, to a roaring, to
a clicking to a hissing uh. And it can it
(15:08):
can be caused by a number of different different things.
It's a symptom of an underlying condition. Generally we're talking
stuff like age related hearing loss, ear injury, or circutary
system disorder. Although it's worth noting that NIDUS affects nearly
half the soldiers exposed to blasts in Iraq and Afghanistan,
and as as we continue to have a lot of
noise pollution in our modern life, this is one of
(15:28):
those issues that keeps coming up again and again, that
that more people are exposed and more people will have
some sort of hearing damage. Because we'll talk about this
in a little bit, but the hearing damage is directly
related to that that map, that tone map in our brains.
But I wanted to just give a little bit more
of a description of tonitas um. Aaron I thought would
(15:50):
be a good person to ask about this. He said
that he first noticed it as a kid. He said,
I can't say when I first noticed it, but it
was definitely when I was a kid. The way I
always remembered it and it's still true today, is that
the sound of the ringing to me sounded almost exactly
like the high pitched sound you'll sometimes hear when someone
would turn on a CRT television. And I had asked
(16:10):
him to if if you are in a moment um,
when you have a state of flow or you're really
enjoying yourself. He's a photographer, for instance, it's a really
awesome photographer by the way, UM, I said, you know,
does it make it stop? And he said, yeah, if
I'm doing something engaging, I tend not to even notice,
not that it isn't there, just that it gets tuned
out like a nagging staffs m A, right, yes you are. UM, so, yes,
(16:35):
there there. The brain can kind of deal with it,
but for the most part, it's there, and it can
be very maddening. And people, UM have been trying to
find solutions to this because it can really be very unsettling. UM.
And there are ways to go about dealing with it.
But some of that is you know, related to Ladakin
for instance, or cognitive behavior therapy. But there is no
(16:57):
magic bullet for this. Yeah. I would mention that, UM,
even portable music devices like MP three players and the
light can contribute to this. Exposure to a lot of
noises over time in the same way that you know,
explosion could do it, but also prolonged to exposure to
a lot of music. Uh So I do recommend UH
that if you have a listening device of this nature,
(17:17):
try turning down the max volume on it UH to
prevent unnecessary damage to you're hearing. You'll hear of various
accounts of famous musicians who suffer from from this just
because they've continually put themselves in an environment where they're
around blaring speakers. Yeah. Actually, one of our coworkers is
a drummer in a band and they just told me
today that he has it. Um. So yeah, I mean
(17:38):
there are there are a bunch of different reasons why
people can experience it, even lightning. Um. There have been
accounts of people who have been near lightening ground lightning
strikes and and have had some hearing damage as a result.
Your wax blockage can do it. Yeah, to your point
that you made in a previous episode, Um, some ear
wax is good, but a lot of your waxes is bad.
(18:00):
It could be bad. But don't ear candle it out though. Yeah, right,
earbone changes um, and then t MJ disorders. It's a
there's a there's a long list of things that can
that can contribute to this. So what's going on in
the brain when this happens? Um to ninus actually arises
when that flexibility and our tone map goes bad. So
(18:20):
again we talked about the ways that those sound vibrations
find the frequencies, and uh, they've got the tone map
in the auditory cortex. So things kind of go awry
when let's say you have toxic drugs or with loud noises,
you have damage to the nerve hairs and the ears.
It's really a story about damage to those hairs that
(18:41):
are picking up the frequencies, and the injured nerve hairs
can no longer send signals from the ear to the
tone map. So it's again it's not the inner ear
making the noise, but the tunnel map. So if you
don't have these incoming signals coming in as they normally would,
the neurons undergo a transformation. They start to eavesdrop on
their neighbors, firing in response to other frequencies, and they
(19:04):
even start to just fire randomly without any incoming signals.
And then as the brains feedback control gets rewired, the
neurons end up in a self sustaining glop, producing a
constant ringing. That's why it's always that the low level,
although sometimes exacerbated and in the volume of it seems
to increase, but that's why it's always there and always present.
(19:25):
And I thought that was very interesting because again we're
talking about here is a type of hallucination by the
auditory cortex or crossing of signals are just absolute firing
out of nowhere and trying to fill that void of
sound from the damaged hair receptor. Okay, so there are
a couple of ways that you can kind of go
(19:46):
about it um in terms of treating it, and as
I mentioned, cognitive behavioral therapy is one of them. I
did want to point out that this is something has
been going on along into our history. This The Assyrians
used to pour rose extract into the ear through a
bronze tube. That sounds delightful, right. To try to alleviate it,
the Roman writer Pliny the Elder suggested that earthworms boiled
(20:07):
in goose grease be put in the ear. That sounds
significantly less pleasant. It is my favorite. Medieval Welsh physicians
in the town of Midify recommended that their patients take
a freshly baked loaf of bread out of the oven,
cut into and then quote apply to both ears as
hot as can be borne, bind and thus produced perspiration
(20:28):
and by the help of God, you will be killed.
Oh my goodness, I hope there are some illustrations of that,
because I'm just picturing like medieval peasants out of out
of a out of a brugal painting, you know, walking
around with with loaves of bread, giant loaves of bread
stuck to their ears. That would be phenomenal, right, and
then then they get teased. They're called Bunnier's. That's just
(20:49):
no fun, just that. Um. So now you know, fast
forward to our modern times and there is an interesting
um tect that some physicians are taking, and this is
music therapy, and I thought this was really interesting. Christo
Pantev and his team at the University of Monster successfully
(21:12):
rewired their tonitas patients tone map by taking the patient's
favorite music and removing from it audio frequencies that matched
that person's tonitis. So this is called notched music and
it contains no energy and that frequency arrange the one
that's bothering them, um, that's surrounding the tonitis frequency. So
(21:35):
there's actually a program um that that does this, that
you can go in and do this. There's a YouTube
video tutorial of this that will show you how to
ascertain your tonitis frequency and then to take it out
of your favorite music. It's pretty cool. So, after one
year listening to um their favorite notch tunes, test subjects
reported a significant decrease in the loudness of the ear ringing,
(21:57):
and that was compared to a matched group of tonitas
patients who listen to a placebo or unaltered music. So
what's more, and this is really interesting, is that the
brain scans found that the neurons tuned to the tonight
frequency in the auditory cortex became less active, so they
sow this decrease. Now, what all this is pointing to
is that this idea of brain plasticity that we've talked
(22:18):
about again and again, and there are doctors who have
likened it to when you lose a limb, a phantom limb,
that you still get senses from that, but your brain
begins to adapt and then it begins to take up
the senses of the other fingers and incorporate that. So
the idea is that perhaps the brain's auditory cortex um
that map could be rerouted in a way that it
(22:41):
could take up the other frequencies in a way that
it doesn't create that feedback loop. So there's there's um
some measure of success there, you know. Obviously again there's
there's no magic bullet here, right, but there are a
number of ways to mitigate it and to treat it. Yeah,
and there's a there's a path at least to say,
there could be a way to in the future at
(23:03):
least really isolated and figure out a good solution. Yeah.
Now that My one problem with that lest study you
mentioned was that even though there was a control group,
there was not a group that had pumpernickel on their
ears that we know of. That we know of that. Yeah,
But I think and then in the name of fairness,
you need your you need your your normal control group,
you need your pumper nickel group, you need your earthworm
(23:24):
um goose liver patte group, you need your your group
that has the rose water and the copper tube. Well,
I would argue that you would also go ahead and
just say sour dough r Yeah, because I mean perhaps
that you know, the attributes of these different types of
breads would have different, uh medicative effects. I don't know.
(23:47):
Maybe there's an aravatic method that uses non I don't know.
I'm sure yeah, I'm sure there's some aravatic methods for
treatment on this. I have to look up. I'm sure
there may even be a mood for it. I don't know.
That's the little hand movement to meditate with a lot
of those are digestion based though, so so maybe not. Now.
I know what a lot of you are thinking about
it tonightas it's it's a pain, all right, it's something
(24:08):
that that can be treated. Uh, there's no magic bullet.
But is tonightas a god? Well, if it's a god, first,
let's let's lay some groundwork first. You'd have to say
that nearly everybody would experience it, right, if you're gonna
take this, this nutty theory and run with it, And
(24:29):
we should point out George Mitchelson foy Um, author of
Shut Up and Listen Hit an article about this in
Psychology Today, he is the chief proponent of this, uh,
this theory. This let's say, more of a thought experiment
that anything philosophical thought experiment. But this is his brain child,
and I dare say he's probably the only person who
(24:50):
thought of this uh previously. It's interesting, it is a
very interesting idea. He it's not a serious argument that
he's making. But it is a very very interesting philosophical
question that is potentially answered by his condition. Yes, and
he lays lays the groundwork to this, this uh assortation
of God and tonitas by saying, Okay, there are a
(25:11):
lot of people who could be sufferers of this. And
in fact I started to think about this. I started
think about miss aphonia, right, And that's that's the sensitivity
is certain noises and that is particular to each person.
And people have argued that msophonia exists within each of us.
There's one little thing like the rubbing of balloons for me,
I can't stand it. Yeah, there's everybody has a trigger.
(25:31):
So George Mitchelson Foy brings up this study, this Swedish
study from fifty three which took eighty college students who
swore they didn't have tenitas, and they put each one
of them in a soundproof environment, and the author's Heller
and Bergmann concluded that audible tenitis was experienced by of
the eight apparently normally hearing adults when placed in the
(25:55):
situation where they had some ambient noise level. So what
he was saying, then, if that's the case, then most
of us experience this, and if we experience this, then
we generate our own sounds, separate from the outside sounds
of our hearing sense that is supposed to pick up
and report. So it's outside of us, is what he's saying.
(26:16):
It's outside of ourselves. It has nothing to do with
our consciousness. So if you if you start getting you know,
very platonic about this, if you dip into a little
reneed carts, uh, then you can arrive at the point
where you say, well, tonitus is something that comes from
outside myself. It is uh, in a way, the horrible
strumming of some awful God perhaps or God itself. Now
(26:40):
we're gonna leave it at that with with this theory,
but it is really interesting and highly recommend any of
the more philosophically minded of our listeners do check that out.
You can find it. Shut up and listen on psychology today,
George Mitchelson Foy. He'll get into all of the philosophical
ins and out. Now. I believe that he is a
sufferer of tonitus as well, and um, and I don't
think that he is trying to make light of this
(27:03):
at all, UM, So please don't take it as that.
But I think that he's just trying to put it
in a context of how do you live with something
that is so pervasive and so um, sometimes disorienting to
your own mind. Yeah, you begin to think of it
and that as something that's other world layer outside of you. Yeah,
and certainly it's there enough to have to start thinking
(27:24):
of new ways to approach it, and to sort of
play with the idea and even maybe enjoy it on
some level, as he does here with this thought experiment.
You know, I was thinking about this movie and um,
you're gonna kill me because I can't think of the
name of it right now, But let's do it. Maybe
maybe you'll remember this. Um, maybe it's called Another World.
The premises, there's this the female heroine who looks up
(27:49):
and sees another earth, Another Earth there, another Earth there you. Yeah,
I have not seen it, but I am familiar with. Okay, Well,
there's a scene when she talks about Russian cosmonaut and
he is ends face shuttle and for six months he's there,
and at the beginning of his journey, he begins to
hear this tap tap tap tap tap tap, and it's
(28:10):
this awful tapping sound, and he realizes that for six months,
he's going to have to live with this noise, and
so he begins to make up this story about this noise,
about how it's his love or how it's this piece
of music, and he recast it as something to live with,
and it's this beautiful moment in the film. In fact,
if we can get some audio, we will certainly share
(28:31):
that with you guys. But I thought, in some sense,
to Nice is sort of like that, are really any
sort of auditory hallucinations outside of yourself, You sort of
have to make them fit into your worldview. Yeah, because
we're we're pattern recognition engines. That's how we roll. We
things that things that occur, even things that don't seem
to line up with our senses, we have to come
up with some sort of explanation for them. And in
(28:53):
that George Mitchelson voice, theory really rings true because it's
kind of how we approach a lot of the things
in our lives. Something unexplained happens, we have to explain it.
We have to fit it into some understanding of the
natural or even unnatural world. Talking to bias, right, yeah,
in a good light? Yes, all right, Well, on that note,
let's let's call the robot over here and just run
(29:15):
through a few quick listener mails. All right, This first
one comes to us from Adam Adam Rights and it says, hey, guys,
I've been enjoying your Nose to Tail series. You pick
You're picking haggis as the food of choice. Brought back
a funny memory. I had three months of training in Edinburgh,
Scotland with a company I previously worked for. During my
first week and instructor told us to try haggas as
(29:35):
it was quote in season. Uh. He went on to
explain that hagas is a small animal that lives in
the Scottish Highlands. It's hard to find, but at the
time it was hunting season, so they would be available
at restaurants. To catch a haggas was an intricate process.
You would first have to find a hole in the
mountains mountain grass where it's obviously been there burrowing, and
(29:56):
then you stay on the same lateral path, not climbing
or descending. You put up a mirror and wait for
the haggests to leave its home. The site of itself
in the mirror would give it a heart attack and
it would die. So although this sounds ridiculous. We were
all in our early twenties from every corner of the globe,
and I heard stranger stories that were from my Chinese
and Omani colleagues. We had haggests that night and the
(30:19):
next day our instructor told us he was just kidding
and then went on to explain what we really ate.
The restaurant we went to even played along, not knowing
we had been had. We asked if Haggis was in season,
and with a smile, he replied, of course. The Scottish
definitely have a sense of good, sense of humor and
like to share their national dish, even if they have
to fib a bit to get you to try it.
(30:39):
Thanks for the great show and keep up the great work.
Lots of love from Cyprus. And that's Adam, our chief,
the chief Happiness Officer of course happiness Plunge dot com,
who's traveling the world doing good. That's right. I was
very excited to know that he's in Cypress right now.
Um so yeah, Haggis was the featured dish that went
down our digestive journey when we did the Nose to
(31:01):
Tail and uh, I love that And now I have
this phrase to catch a haggas my brain picturing that
in my head, the hag is running along and you
know the mountain habitat and burrowing. That's great. Yeah, a
little Haggs creature. What would that look like? I suppose
(31:21):
the uh the animals from which its organs come from.
All right, here's one from our listener, Jen jen Wrightson
and says, Dear Robert and Julie, Stuff to Blow your
mind is one of my favorite podcasts, and I listened
to it all the time. Thank you so much for
the work you do. The episodes are always exciting and insightful.
I was reminded of something you might be interested in
when I listened to your episode Undercover Actors in the
Shadow Self, in which Julie mentioned how costly it is
(31:44):
for secret agents to keep in mind UH an entire
cover story about themselves. When I was in grad school,
I used to get sick all the time whenever I
got on a plane, which was often. It happened so
often that I started joking about it. I said I
hadn't the immune system of a baby squirrel, and that
I was a canary in a coal mine, because if
anybody on that plane had a cold, or the flu
soon I would too. I kept up the joking for
(32:04):
almost ten years until I realized that for the last
few years I hadn't gotten sick at all, even though
I'd been traveling at the same rate as before. My
diet and exercise hadn't changed. So what was it I
come out in retrospect? The break between coal minor canary
UH and quite healthy person can be placed cleanly in
the couple of months that I came out as gay
to everyone I knew. Even though my life had had
periods of been kent stressed, since then, I've never I've
(32:26):
never gotten sick at that rate. That Seriously, again, I
had spent my life laying a cover story, fiction written
for other people, over my real, stealth self. It wasn't
until I shucked it off that I realized how heavy
that story was. Anyway, your podcast made me realize that
even if I changed careers in the future, one thing
I had never ever want to be is a spy.
(32:46):
Thank you for all you do best, Jen Love. That's
a great story. That is a great story, and I
think that that speaks volumes to how we feel when
we are We feel like we're suppressing something or suppressing
you know, things that are very important about ourselves. That
um she says, you're you're putting a cover story over yourself. Yeah,
there's a cognitive and emotional um toll to be had
(33:09):
when you have to layer these uh these these layers
of fiction over your real self. So thank you Jim
for sharing that. So everyone out there, I'm sure you
you have some some feedback you'd like to give on
this or other episodes, particularly if you like Aaron experience
Tonight's in your daily life. Let us know how you
deal with it. Uh. What are the methods that you
(33:30):
use to treat it, either methods that have been uh
given to you or methods that you've sort of developed
on your your own way of coping with it. We'd
love to hear your feedback on this. So you can
find us in a number of places. Of course, the
mothership for everything we do is stuff to Blow your
Mind dot Com. Uh. You'll find our blogs there, you'll
find our audio episode, to find our video, um, you'll
(33:50):
find your lost car keys. It's all there. You can
also find us on very social media networks, I mean
the Picklin of course. Facebook. We're stuff to blow your
mind on that we're un tumbler. We're stuff to your
mind on Twitter will blow the Mind and on YouTube
our channel is mind Stuff Show. And just wanted to
thank Aaron for sharing his story with us, for sharing
the audio clips so that you all could get a
(34:12):
sense of it too. And uh, if you guys want
to write into us and let us know about your
own experiences or any questions you may have, you can
do so at blow the Mind at Discovery dot com
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it,
How staff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
This is Robert Lamb, and you're whispering, I guests in
an attempt to be to be quiet, because we're we're
in a sort of quiet room. Um it's it's padded though.
(00:27):
On the other side of the padding there are windows
I can't move my own, and then the other side
of the windows there is a train and traffic and
occasionally helicopters and sirens, uh, birds slamming into the glass,
all that sort of fun stuff. So occasionally we have
to take breaks here as we record for outside sounds,
but we attempt to to keep the sound of the
(00:49):
world at bay with all of us padding right, and
also by keeping our volume up. When you whisper like that,
you're actually doing us a disservice because we as we'll
discussing this podcast. The quieter it gets, the more you hear,
so I really get your attention. Yeah, well, well, let's
let's be quiet for a second. Let's see if they
can hear the ambient sounds of the studio. Terrifying, isn't it?
(01:11):
It kind of is. Actually, I don't know if you
guys can pick that up. Probably not, but it does
have kind of like a two thousand and one sound
to it, just sort of the void but something there. Um. Yeah,
so we are. We're taking on the subject of quietude,
and we're taking on the subject through a vehicle called
literally the Quietest Room in the World. Yes, Now, the
(01:33):
subject of quiet, the sound of silence and all that
reminds me a lot of some of what we touched
on in our older episode, um splendid isolation. We're talking
about isolation to a certain extent century deprivation and uh
and loneliness, and talking about how for a lot of
us we have this weird thing where, you know, we
we want isolation, we want to move away from people.
(01:56):
But then if but we if we get too much
of that, it's not we're not We're gonna go past
the beneficial stage of of isolation and we're going to
get into the harmful levels of it. And likewise, with
quiet we see a similar thing. I think more and
more we live in noisy, busy lives. You know, the
world is full of sound, The world is full of
(02:17):
of movement and energy, and for a lot of us
that comes a point where you just want to be
in a place where there is no sounds. You want
to find that monastery on a hill, you want to
find that secret library, that secret garden, and just get
away from it and shut it all off. And and
it's I think it's important to to have that in
some way, shape or form. But then what happens if
(02:38):
you do enter a place that is so quiet that
there is there is there's almost no sound at all,
Then what can that do to It's horrifying to the brain. Really,
it's inconceivable because the brain is not the we we
don't have monastery brains. We have we have, you know,
busy city brains. We have a chirping bird brains. We
(02:58):
have brains that need various bits of input coming in
and giving us a changing, constantly altering view of the world.
But if the view of the world is just nothing,
then things can get out of hand well. And and
human hearing is certainly part of this something of the world. Right.
There's a great article by George Mitchelson Foy called Shut
(03:19):
Up and Listen from Psychology Today, and he talks about
human hearing is being a beautiful sensitive system of organic microphones,
signal processors, amplifiers like your home stereo, only better. And
what happens when you switch on your home stereo, well,
it gives off a very faint hum. The same is
true of your hearing apparatus. Like any sound system, it
generates its own little hum when working. And so this
(03:43):
is sort of a natural state of of ourselves and
our beings and the our machinery. We just don't think
about it. We think about when we want to, you know,
do a foreshutdown of our brain or um enter into
this silence, this quietude, that it should all be absolute
sign lens. But it cannot be right because inevitably, you
you just hear the sound of your hearing. You'll hear
(04:06):
the sound of your your blood circulating, of your heart beating,
of your own breathing, just kind of the stillness of
the air almost and you know, the quieter it gets,
the more your ears listen. Yeah, I wanted to mention
if you guys will indulge me for a second um
our tone map in our ears, because I think this
is really interesting because we usually think, okay, well, we
(04:26):
you know, we take in sound and it vibrates our
ear and it goes to the middle ear and so
want to sit with the ricochet's Well, we know, we
all know sort of the basics of that. So beyond
you know, making our ear drums vibrate, there's a lot
going on. These vibrations cause nerve hairs in the inner
ear to shiver and that triggers electric signals that travel
along the auditory nerve into the brain. And then one
(04:48):
of the first stops is a patch of gray matter
called the auditory cortex. Now this is where everything happens.
We usually think that, uh, noise happens, or the perception
of it happens in the inner ear, but it's the
auditory cortex in our brain. And each nerve is tuned
to a particular frequency of sound and excites only certain
neurons in the auditory cortex. And then as a result,
(05:11):
the neurons in the auditory cortex form what is known
as a tone map, and the neurons at one end
of the auditory cortex are tuned to low frequencies, and
the farther you go towards the other end, the higher
the tuning of the neurons. So the auditory cortex you
can almost think of it as a musical instrument. Uh,
and it is the musical instrument is played upon by
(05:32):
these electrical impulses. Yeah, exactly, and it's it's a it's
like an elaborate feedback system too, because the neurons do
more than just relay signals forward into the brain. They
also signal back down the line, and they reached to
neighboring neurons that are tuned to nearby frequency, exciting some
and then muzzling others. It sort of reminded me of
(05:53):
when we were talking about memory last week, about how
you know, with memory, you have certain neurons, excited clusters
that are rising up and tamping down other competing neurons
to bring a memory forward. It's a little bit similar
to the way that we're perceiving sound and processing it. Right,
You've got these excited neurons that are making their way
(06:15):
and sort of crossing with other frequencies. And so these
are kind of like feedback controls, and they allow us
to sift through those incoming sounds and figure out the
most important information and how to make sense of them
without being drowned out by all the other meaning less
noise around us. All right, well, we're gonna take a
quick breaking when we come back, we will enter the
quietest room in the world. All right, we're back, and U.
(06:46):
We've talked about sound. We've talked about how it enters
the brain, how we perceive it, how it contributes our
understanding of the world, and uh, we've touched on how
when we begin to to crank down the sound in
our life, we begin to hear more of the noises
that are off hidden um even when the speaker, to
your point, even when the speaker is not playing, there
is a humming and we don't notice the humming when
the speaker is blaring some music at us. But when
(07:09):
the speaker is on but silent, it's not really silent.
You've got that feedback system exactly. So if we were
to travel to or Field Laboratories in Minneapolis, we would
find a room that blocks all sound. That's right, and
let's enter this chamber. In order to enter this chamber,
(07:29):
which is also called an ana coic chamber, we must
pass through two vaults to get into it. And it
is a room that is so soundproof it is officially
listed as the quietest place on earth. This is according
to the Guinness World Records. They wouldn't lie because they
keep me updated on how many eggs people can eat
and who's the fattest. So that's what they do. Many
(07:50):
take names and they tabulate all this stuff. The room
is used sometimes for technical analysis, for example company companies
testing out the sound of a switch or a dial
or some other mechanical component. In fact, past clients have
included Whirlpool and Hardley Davidson, which used the chamber in
an effort to produce quieter motorcycles. They want quieter motorcycles. Yeah,
(08:11):
we've never know in Atlanta because it's just it's like
packs and packs of crazy lad motorcycles. But it is
also used. This room is also used as a cycle
psychological chamber of will. Yes, so how's it constructed? What
is made? What is it made of? How do you
make a room that is so devoid of sound? Because
clearly we're not in one right now, um, and we
(08:32):
take quite a lot of work to really get that
kind of soundless. Uh. Construction for starters, the chamber features
three point three ft thick fiberglass acoustic wedges, double walls
of insulated steel and foot thick concrete. And again this
enables it to be ninety sound absorbent with a decibel
rating of negative nine point four d b a. So
(08:54):
any sounds below the threshold of zero d b a
is undetectable by the human ear. It's true. Like so
it's virtually like zero sound being, you know, bounced off
the walls here. And that's what's so interesting here too,
is that it is under the radar of human sound.
As you say, minus night point nine point four deciples
we hear at zero and above. So what happens here,
(09:18):
that's where the psychological will UH chamber will comes into play.
What happens here is that people go a little bit
nuts because it's quiet, yeah, like crazy quiet. There's a
mesh floor in the ceiling, and as you mentioned, you
have that meter along fiberglass acoustic wedge in there. So
what happens when you put a human being in there, well,
they become disoriented or they even experienced hallucinations because after
(09:43):
a few minutes, UH founder Stephen Orfield told the Daily
Mailie says, your body begins to adapt to the soundlessness,
picking up smaller and smaller sounds. You'll hear your heart beating. Sometimes,
you can hear your lungs, your stomach gurgling loudly, and
then in the antichoic chamber, you become the sound. So
(10:04):
all of this becomes really disorienting in space and time.
In fact, there's a chair in there for the sole
purpose of allowing people to try to figure out their
place in space and time because they don't have the
I would hope, wouldn't that be the worst. But the
idea is that we we don't think about it, but
the vibrations around us and kind of give us these
(10:25):
auditory cues about where things are in space and time.
And if you don't really have that, then you begin
to feel as though you're sort of unmoored from your reality.
And it turns out that people who are in there
for more than thirty minutes have to sit down, and
the longest that anybody has ever made it in there
is forty five minutes. Wow. Because yeah, after a while,
you begin to you begin to hear more and more
of these real sounds as you mentioned, but then you
(10:47):
inevitably can end up hearing these unreal sounds as well.
Audible hallucinations can exactly. Yeah, you've got that tone map
kind of going nuts with what it does and doesn't
have available to it, and it starts filling in the blanks.
Y you had mentioned in the last podcast, there's a
two thousand and nine study that shows that in another chamber,
that's just fifteen minutes before people have started to hallucinate
(11:08):
one way or another. Because again, our brains have not
involved to live in a world of such silence. We
we we've evolved to live in a world full of sounds,
sounds that our brain has to decipher in order to
navigate our way safely through it. And so at this point,
our brain is saying, I don't know, man, it's all
quiet there. Let's let's listen harder, Let's listen, har Let's
fill in the blanks, because there might be something out
(11:30):
there that could kill us, something out there that could
sustain us, and we need to know where everything is, right,
I mean, we we are built for sound, and and
to take that away is to really scramble the brain
into the brain to actually lose some of its purpose. Right, Um,
You will not be surprised that NASA has also used
the room. Yes, and of course they've ratcheted up the
(11:50):
sensory deprivation levels by of course putting a water filled
tank in the room for astronauts to plunge into just
to make it a little bit more intent and to
figure out how long it takes before hallucinations start to
set in. Yeah, because we've mentioned in a previous episode
the you know, what is a spaceship, what is a
what is a space station? But a form of sensory deprivation.
(12:12):
It is at the very least, um just a portion
of our natural environment that is completely cut off, like
an on a planetary scale from where we're supposed to
live and there so that you're can be isolated from
outside sounds. Uh, sound is going to travel a little
differently inside the capsule. It's just going to be a
totally different experience. So the more we know about how
this affects the human body and how we can uh
(12:35):
roll with the with the effects and and also limit
the detrimental effects, all the better. And the more that
Commander Chris Hadfield can post those awesome videos right first
Ultimate Joy, Yeah, it makes more. You know, it's like,
of course you let the man bring a guitar up
there and cut a music video because uh, you know,
aside from being very educational and really you know, really
(12:56):
overall just really great for the space program. Although the
videos he was doing up there, and and also the
fun stuff, but also it keeps somebody from going nuts.
It would have been a totally different YouTube series if
he had just been going gradually insane from hearing no
sound in thember, right exactly. You know, among the many
detrimental effects of of exposure to such prolonged and ponderous silence,
(13:20):
um is a spontaneous tonitis. That's right, because it's it's
believed to be a response of the auditory cortex, which
we talked about to the abnormal absence of all ambient sounds,
and we really started to think about this. Tonita is
sometimes called tenatus. I believe that either way is correct,
but we began to think about this. This really is
(13:42):
the opposite of silence or what we think about silence,
because it's often called this sort of low ringing of
the ears or this humming sound, and a lot of
people are affected by it. And in fact, one of
our listeners, Aaron, actually emailed us about it when we
were talking about different topic emotions and outer space, and
(14:02):
let me just read a quick excerpt of that. He says, funny,
you should happen to mention my tonitis request at the
end of today's Emotions and Outer Space episode. Because as
you guys were discussing how maddening the idea of a
completely silent room would be, I was just thinking to myself,
Holy crap, you have no idea, speaking of which, because
he has tenitus, of course, Speaking of which, here's an
(14:23):
MP three I made a while back which simulates, to
the best of garage bands ability, what my tonitis sounds like.
For the most convincing effect, play it in a quiet
room at a level just above that of whisper enjoy
you won't um. So we're gonna have a quick clip
of that so that everybody can kind of understand what
we're talking about when we talk about tonitus. Yeah, so
(14:48):
that I can see where that would that would get
a little old really fast, right. Yeah. Now, it's it's
worth pointing out that that about one in five people
experience this, and the the the way that the noise
is described by people who who experienced it, it ranges
from a ringing to a buzzing, to a roaring, to
a clicking to a hissing uh. And it can it
(15:08):
can be caused by a number of different different things.
It's a symptom of an underlying condition. Generally we're talking
stuff like age related hearing loss, ear injury, or circutary
system disorder. Although it's worth noting that NIDUS affects nearly
half the soldiers exposed to blasts in Iraq and Afghanistan,
and as as we continue to have a lot of
noise pollution in our modern life, this is one of
(15:28):
those issues that keeps coming up again and again, that
that more people are exposed and more people will have
some sort of hearing damage. Because we'll talk about this
in a little bit, but the hearing damage is directly
related to that that map, that tone map in our brains.
But I wanted to just give a little bit more
of a description of tonitas um. Aaron I thought would
(15:50):
be a good person to ask about this. He said
that he first noticed it as a kid. He said,
I can't say when I first noticed it, but it
was definitely when I was a kid. The way I
always remembered it and it's still true today, is that
the sound of the ringing to me sounded almost exactly
like the high pitched sound you'll sometimes hear when someone
would turn on a CRT television. And I had asked
(16:10):
him to if if you are in a moment um,
when you have a state of flow or you're really
enjoying yourself. He's a photographer, for instance, it's a really
awesome photographer by the way, UM, I said, you know,
does it make it stop? And he said, yeah, if
I'm doing something engaging, I tend not to even notice,
not that it isn't there, just that it gets tuned
out like a nagging staffs m A, right, yes you are. UM, so, yes,
(16:35):
there there. The brain can kind of deal with it,
but for the most part, it's there, and it can
be very maddening. And people, UM have been trying to
find solutions to this because it can really be very unsettling. UM.
And there are ways to go about dealing with it.
But some of that is you know, related to Ladakin
for instance, or cognitive behavior therapy. But there is no
(16:57):
magic bullet for this. Yeah. I would mention that, UM,
even portable music devices like MP three players and the
light can contribute to this. Exposure to a lot of
noises over time in the same way that you know,
explosion could do it, but also prolonged to exposure to
a lot of music. Uh So I do recommend UH
that if you have a listening device of this nature,
(17:17):
try turning down the max volume on it UH to
prevent unnecessary damage to you're hearing. You'll hear of various
accounts of famous musicians who suffer from from this just
because they've continually put themselves in an environment where they're
around blaring speakers. Yeah. Actually, one of our coworkers is
a drummer in a band and they just told me
today that he has it. Um. So yeah, I mean
(17:38):
there are there are a bunch of different reasons why
people can experience it, even lightning. Um. There have been
accounts of people who have been near lightening ground lightning
strikes and and have had some hearing damage as a result.
Your wax blockage can do it. Yeah, to your point
that you made in a previous episode, Um, some ear
wax is good, but a lot of your waxes is bad.
(18:00):
It could be bad. But don't ear candle it out though. Yeah, right,
earbone changes um, and then t MJ disorders. It's a
there's a there's a long list of things that can
that can contribute to this. So what's going on in
the brain when this happens? Um to ninus actually arises
when that flexibility and our tone map goes bad. So
(18:20):
again we talked about the ways that those sound vibrations
find the frequencies, and uh, they've got the tone map
in the auditory cortex. So things kind of go awry
when let's say you have toxic drugs or with loud noises,
you have damage to the nerve hairs and the ears.
It's really a story about damage to those hairs that
(18:41):
are picking up the frequencies, and the injured nerve hairs
can no longer send signals from the ear to the
tone map. So it's again it's not the inner ear
making the noise, but the tunnel map. So if you
don't have these incoming signals coming in as they normally would,
the neurons undergo a transformation. They start to eavesdrop on
their neighbors, firing in response to other frequencies, and they
(19:04):
even start to just fire randomly without any incoming signals.
And then as the brains feedback control gets rewired, the
neurons end up in a self sustaining glop, producing a
constant ringing. That's why it's always that the low level,
although sometimes exacerbated and in the volume of it seems
to increase, but that's why it's always there and always present.
(19:25):
And I thought that was very interesting because again we're
talking about here is a type of hallucination by the
auditory cortex or crossing of signals are just absolute firing
out of nowhere and trying to fill that void of
sound from the damaged hair receptor. Okay, so there are
a couple of ways that you can kind of go
(19:46):
about it um in terms of treating it, and as
I mentioned, cognitive behavioral therapy is one of them. I
did want to point out that this is something has
been going on along into our history. This The Assyrians
used to pour rose extract into the ear through a
bronze tube. That sounds delightful, right. To try to alleviate it,
the Roman writer Pliny the Elder suggested that earthworms boiled
(20:07):
in goose grease be put in the ear. That sounds
significantly less pleasant. It is my favorite. Medieval Welsh physicians
in the town of Midify recommended that their patients take
a freshly baked loaf of bread out of the oven,
cut into and then quote apply to both ears as
hot as can be borne, bind and thus produced perspiration
(20:28):
and by the help of God, you will be killed.
Oh my goodness, I hope there are some illustrations of that,
because I'm just picturing like medieval peasants out of out
of a out of a brugal painting, you know, walking
around with with loaves of bread, giant loaves of bread
stuck to their ears. That would be phenomenal, right, and
then then they get teased. They're called Bunnier's. That's just
(20:49):
no fun, just that. Um. So now you know, fast
forward to our modern times and there is an interesting
um tect that some physicians are taking, and this is
music therapy, and I thought this was really interesting. Christo
Pantev and his team at the University of Monster successfully
(21:12):
rewired their tonitas patients tone map by taking the patient's
favorite music and removing from it audio frequencies that matched
that person's tonitis. So this is called notched music and
it contains no energy and that frequency arrange the one
that's bothering them, um, that's surrounding the tonitis frequency. So
(21:35):
there's actually a program um that that does this, that
you can go in and do this. There's a YouTube
video tutorial of this that will show you how to
ascertain your tonitis frequency and then to take it out
of your favorite music. It's pretty cool. So, after one
year listening to um their favorite notch tunes, test subjects
reported a significant decrease in the loudness of the ear ringing,
(21:57):
and that was compared to a matched group of tonitas
patients who listen to a placebo or unaltered music. So
what's more, and this is really interesting, is that the
brain scans found that the neurons tuned to the tonight
frequency in the auditory cortex became less active, so they
sow this decrease. Now, what all this is pointing to
is that this idea of brain plasticity that we've talked
(22:18):
about again and again, and there are doctors who have
likened it to when you lose a limb, a phantom limb,
that you still get senses from that, but your brain
begins to adapt and then it begins to take up
the senses of the other fingers and incorporate that. So
the idea is that perhaps the brain's auditory cortex um
that map could be rerouted in a way that it
(22:41):
could take up the other frequencies in a way that
it doesn't create that feedback loop. So there's there's um
some measure of success there, you know. Obviously again there's
there's no magic bullet here, right, but there are a
number of ways to mitigate it and to treat it. Yeah,
and there's a there's a path at least to say,
there could be a way to in the future at
(23:03):
least really isolated and figure out a good solution. Yeah.
Now that My one problem with that lest study you
mentioned was that even though there was a control group,
there was not a group that had pumpernickel on their
ears that we know of. That we know of that. Yeah,
But I think and then in the name of fairness,
you need your you need your your normal control group,
you need your pumper nickel group, you need your earthworm
(23:24):
um goose liver patte group, you need your your group
that has the rose water and the copper tube. Well,
I would argue that you would also go ahead and
just say sour dough r Yeah, because I mean perhaps
that you know, the attributes of these different types of
breads would have different, uh medicative effects. I don't know.
(23:47):
Maybe there's an aravatic method that uses non I don't know.
I'm sure yeah, I'm sure there's some aravatic methods for
treatment on this. I have to look up. I'm sure
there may even be a mood for it. I don't know.
That's the little hand movement to meditate with a lot
of those are digestion based though, so so maybe not. Now.
I know what a lot of you are thinking about
it tonightas it's it's a pain, all right, it's something
(24:08):
that that can be treated. Uh, there's no magic bullet.
But is tonightas a god? Well, if it's a god, first,
let's let's lay some groundwork first. You'd have to say
that nearly everybody would experience it, right, if you're gonna
take this, this nutty theory and run with it, And
(24:29):
we should point out George Mitchelson foy Um, author of
Shut Up and Listen Hit an article about this in
Psychology Today, he is the chief proponent of this, uh,
this theory. This let's say, more of a thought experiment
that anything philosophical thought experiment. But this is his brain child,
and I dare say he's probably the only person who
(24:50):
thought of this uh previously. It's interesting, it is a
very interesting idea. He it's not a serious argument that
he's making. But it is a very very interesting philosophical
question that is potentially answered by his condition. Yes, and
he lays lays the groundwork to this, this uh assortation
of God and tonitas by saying, Okay, there are a
(25:11):
lot of people who could be sufferers of this. And
in fact I started to think about this. I started
think about miss aphonia, right, And that's that's the sensitivity
is certain noises and that is particular to each person.
And people have argued that msophonia exists within each of us.
There's one little thing like the rubbing of balloons for me,
I can't stand it. Yeah, there's everybody has a trigger.
(25:31):
So George Mitchelson Foy brings up this study, this Swedish
study from fifty three which took eighty college students who
swore they didn't have tenitas, and they put each one
of them in a soundproof environment, and the author's Heller
and Bergmann concluded that audible tenitis was experienced by of
the eight apparently normally hearing adults when placed in the
(25:55):
situation where they had some ambient noise level. So what
he was saying, then, if that's the case, then most
of us experience this, and if we experience this, then
we generate our own sounds, separate from the outside sounds
of our hearing sense that is supposed to pick up
and report. So it's outside of us, is what he's saying.
(26:16):
It's outside of ourselves. It has nothing to do with
our consciousness. So if you if you start getting you know,
very platonic about this, if you dip into a little
reneed carts, uh, then you can arrive at the point
where you say, well, tonitus is something that comes from
outside myself. It is uh, in a way, the horrible
strumming of some awful God perhaps or God itself. Now
(26:40):
we're gonna leave it at that with with this theory,
but it is really interesting and highly recommend any of
the more philosophically minded of our listeners do check that out.
You can find it. Shut up and listen on psychology today,
George Mitchelson Foy. He'll get into all of the philosophical
ins and out. Now. I believe that he is a
sufferer of tonitus as well, and um, and I don't
think that he is trying to make light of this
(27:03):
at all, UM, So please don't take it as that.
But I think that he's just trying to put it
in a context of how do you live with something
that is so pervasive and so um, sometimes disorienting to
your own mind. Yeah, you begin to think of it
and that as something that's other world layer outside of you. Yeah,
and certainly it's there enough to have to start thinking
(27:24):
of new ways to approach it, and to sort of
play with the idea and even maybe enjoy it on
some level, as he does here with this thought experiment.
You know, I was thinking about this movie and um,
you're gonna kill me because I can't think of the
name of it right now, But let's do it. Maybe
maybe you'll remember this. Um, maybe it's called Another World.
The premises, there's this the female heroine who looks up
(27:49):
and sees another earth, Another Earth there, another Earth there you. Yeah,
I have not seen it, but I am familiar with. Okay, Well,
there's a scene when she talks about Russian cosmonaut and
he is ends face shuttle and for six months he's there,
and at the beginning of his journey, he begins to
hear this tap tap tap tap tap tap, and it's
(28:10):
this awful tapping sound, and he realizes that for six months,
he's going to have to live with this noise, and
so he begins to make up this story about this noise,
about how it's his love or how it's this piece
of music, and he recast it as something to live with,
and it's this beautiful moment in the film. In fact,
if we can get some audio, we will certainly share
(28:31):
that with you guys. But I thought, in some sense,
to Nice is sort of like that, are really any
sort of auditory hallucinations outside of yourself, You sort of
have to make them fit into your worldview. Yeah, because
we're we're pattern recognition engines. That's how we roll. We
things that things that occur, even things that don't seem
to line up with our senses, we have to come
up with some sort of explanation for them. And in
(28:53):
that George Mitchelson voice, theory really rings true because it's
kind of how we approach a lot of the things
in our lives. Something unexplained happens, we have to explain it.
We have to fit it into some understanding of the
natural or even unnatural world. Talking to bias, right, yeah,
in a good light? Yes, all right, Well, on that note,
let's let's call the robot over here and just run
(29:15):
through a few quick listener mails. All right, This first
one comes to us from Adam Adam Rights and it says, hey, guys,
I've been enjoying your Nose to Tail series. You pick
You're picking haggis as the food of choice. Brought back
a funny memory. I had three months of training in Edinburgh,
Scotland with a company I previously worked for. During my
first week and instructor told us to try haggas as
(29:35):
it was quote in season. Uh. He went on to
explain that hagas is a small animal that lives in
the Scottish Highlands. It's hard to find, but at the
time it was hunting season, so they would be available
at restaurants. To catch a haggas was an intricate process.
You would first have to find a hole in the
mountains mountain grass where it's obviously been there burrowing, and
(29:56):
then you stay on the same lateral path, not climbing
or descending. You put up a mirror and wait for
the haggests to leave its home. The site of itself
in the mirror would give it a heart attack and
it would die. So although this sounds ridiculous. We were
all in our early twenties from every corner of the globe,
and I heard stranger stories that were from my Chinese
and Omani colleagues. We had haggests that night and the
(30:19):
next day our instructor told us he was just kidding
and then went on to explain what we really ate.
The restaurant we went to even played along, not knowing
we had been had. We asked if Haggis was in season,
and with a smile, he replied, of course. The Scottish
definitely have a sense of good, sense of humor and
like to share their national dish, even if they have
to fib a bit to get you to try it.
(30:39):
Thanks for the great show and keep up the great work.
Lots of love from Cyprus. And that's Adam, our chief,
the chief Happiness Officer of course happiness Plunge dot com,
who's traveling the world doing good. That's right. I was
very excited to know that he's in Cypress right now.
Um so yeah, Haggis was the featured dish that went
down our digestive journey when we did the Nose to
(31:01):
Tail and uh, I love that And now I have
this phrase to catch a haggas my brain picturing that
in my head, the hag is running along and you
know the mountain habitat and burrowing. That's great. Yeah, a
little Haggs creature. What would that look like? I suppose
(31:21):
the uh the animals from which its organs come from.
All right, here's one from our listener, Jen jen Wrightson
and says, Dear Robert and Julie, Stuff to Blow your
mind is one of my favorite podcasts, and I listened
to it all the time. Thank you so much for
the work you do. The episodes are always exciting and insightful.
I was reminded of something you might be interested in
when I listened to your episode Undercover Actors in the
Shadow Self, in which Julie mentioned how costly it is
(31:44):
for secret agents to keep in mind UH an entire
cover story about themselves. When I was in grad school,
I used to get sick all the time whenever I
got on a plane, which was often. It happened so
often that I started joking about it. I said I
hadn't the immune system of a baby squirrel, and that
I was a canary in a coal mine, because if
anybody on that plane had a cold, or the flu
soon I would too. I kept up the joking for
(32:04):
almost ten years until I realized that for the last
few years I hadn't gotten sick at all, even though
I'd been traveling at the same rate as before. My
diet and exercise hadn't changed. So what was it I
come out in retrospect? The break between coal minor canary
UH and quite healthy person can be placed cleanly in
the couple of months that I came out as gay
to everyone I knew. Even though my life had had
periods of been kent stressed, since then, I've never I've
(32:26):
never gotten sick at that rate. That Seriously, again, I
had spent my life laying a cover story, fiction written
for other people, over my real, stealth self. It wasn't
until I shucked it off that I realized how heavy
that story was. Anyway, your podcast made me realize that
even if I changed careers in the future, one thing
I had never ever want to be is a spy.
(32:46):
Thank you for all you do best, Jen Love. That's
a great story. That is a great story, and I
think that that speaks volumes to how we feel when
we are We feel like we're suppressing something or suppressing
you know, things that are very important about ourselves. That
um she says, you're you're putting a cover story over yourself. Yeah,
there's a cognitive and emotional um toll to be had
(33:09):
when you have to layer these uh these these layers
of fiction over your real self. So thank you Jim
for sharing that. So everyone out there, I'm sure you
you have some some feedback you'd like to give on
this or other episodes, particularly if you like Aaron experience
Tonight's in your daily life. Let us know how you
deal with it. Uh. What are the methods that you
(33:30):
use to treat it, either methods that have been uh
given to you or methods that you've sort of developed
on your your own way of coping with it. We'd
love to hear your feedback on this. So you can
find us in a number of places. Of course, the
mothership for everything we do is stuff to Blow your
Mind dot Com. Uh. You'll find our blogs there, you'll
find our audio episode, to find our video, um, you'll
(33:50):
find your lost car keys. It's all there. You can
also find us on very social media networks, I mean
the Picklin of course. Facebook. We're stuff to blow your
mind on that we're un tumbler. We're stuff to your
mind on Twitter will blow the Mind and on YouTube
our channel is mind Stuff Show. And just wanted to
thank Aaron for sharing his story with us, for sharing
the audio clips so that you all could get a
(34:12):
sense of it too. And uh, if you guys want
to write into us and let us know about your
own experiences or any questions you may have, you can
do so at blow the Mind at Discovery dot com
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it,
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