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August 31, 2016 64 mins

We all have a pretty good notion of noise, but what exactly is silence?

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Episode Transcript

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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.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick and Robert.
I'd like you to think about something, and that's what
I'm here for. I want you to think about the

(00:23):
idea of the substance of absence in our in our
sensory experience of the world. So we all experience this
in our lives where there is a stark disconnect between
everything we know about physics and what are intuitions tell us.
And one of the examples of this is that there
is no such substance in physics as cold, right, Cold

(00:47):
is just the absence of heat energy. And yet if
you have an experience 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. You are meeting a substance of coldness
that is an independent material reality in itself, not unlike

(01:08):
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 it interpret what's happening it 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.

(01:30):
So in order to get visions, you must be reaching
out with your eyes in some way to pull things in. Yeah.
Also to mention light, there's no such substance in physics
as darkness. Of course, darkness is just the absence of light.
But 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

(01:50):
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 the shadow realm uh, breaching your immediate universe. Well,
of course I speak not of beings of darkness, because

(02:11):
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 pressure waves of energy that we call sound. But
in psychological terms, I wonder it is silence a substance

(02:33):
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, 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,

(02:54):
and at this time, Uh, the quietest place in the
world was a type of room known as an an
a co wick chamber, meaning a chamber that's echo free
no echoes, at a facility in Minneapolis, Minnesota called or
Field Laboratories. You remember doing this episode. I assume no
one has wiped your memory. It's amazing how much I

(03:14):
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 Obscura, it's actually in the
same building where Bob Dylan recorded Blood on the Tracks,
not the same room, but the same building. Uh, and

(03:34):
so this room is used to test appliances and equipment
for sound production under very very sensitive conditions by creating
the most the quietest environment we could imagine. And to
achieve these conditions, the room has been built in a
very weird way. So it's got double layered steel and
foot thick concrete walls. It's got this vault type door,

(03:56):
and then on the walls from floor to see ling,
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 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

(04:19):
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 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

(04:41):
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 something like negative
thirteen decibels, that might sound kind of weird, right, How
how could you have negative sound, especially since you you
look at various lists and near total silence is zero

(05:06):
A whispers fifteen, so it's like a negative whisper. How
is that possible? Well, zero decipels actually doesn't mean no sound.
Zero decibels is just taken to be the threshold of
normal human hearing and birth your best hearing. Infancy hearing
people can usually detect sounds above zero decibels. Below zero decibels,

(05:28):
you know, too bad a very human scale. It's a
scale based on human perception of sound, not sound is
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 underverse. It puts you in a
very bizarre state of mind. People who have gone here

(05:49):
report that they have a hard time staying in the
room too long. They used to have this thing. All
the articles about it mentioned this challenge that the owner
seems very excited about. Where he would test to people
to see how long they could stay in there. You
seem 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

(06:10):
reference to. Actually, I've never seen chronically that's the under
verse is a big deal in that. Oh, the under
verse is bigger than than Riddick. Oh well, I don't know,
ridd it'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
antichote chamber, what happens is people become just hyper aware

(06:30):
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,
and you hear this hissing and rustling which is your
own respiration. And media reports also claim that people become dizzy, disoriented,
sometimes kind of panicky, which suggests that our hearing is

(06:50):
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.
This kind of suggests that even people with normal senses,
all of 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

(07:13):
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 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

(07:34):
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 in in quiet chambers.
We evolved 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

(07:55):
has to gulp in more of it. 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 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 anteco chambers is that

(08:16):
you might go into there and experience auditory hallucinations just
because of that sensory deprivation element. But anyway, since that
podcast that you and Julie recorded, there's a new kid
in town. Microsoft has built a silent mind flare chamber,
even more psychedelically quiet than the one at oar Field Labs.
And much like the other facility, this one is used

(08:38):
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 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 whisperhaps for them, and it was

(09:00):
completed in July. But compared to or fields negative thirteen decibles,
this room gets as quiet as negative twenty point six decibles.
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

(09:21):
in a vacuum. If you were to go into the
vacuum of space, you wouldn't hear anything. But in a
room filled just screams exactly. But in a room filled
with normal atmosphere, negative twenty three decibles is about as
quiet as things can get, because that's the sound level
of what's known as Brownian motion, which is the random
movement of air particles rustling against one another. I would

(09:45):
love to hear what that sounds like. I think Brownian
motion of air particles. There's actually an email album, yeah yeah,
like a late seventies a perfect companion to metal machine music. Yea. Anyway,
so I started thinking about this room and about how
there are actually plenty of god beings and monsters from

(10:06):
the history of human imagination who have found themselves in
a dire quest for a place like this room. I
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

(10:27):
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
cacaphony with modernity. But but this feeling goes way back.
Oh yeah, I mean, really, humans haven't changed that much,
not so much that they've stopped being annoying and obnoxious

(10:50):
and loud. We've we've had a loud talkers among us.
We've had we've had individuals who cannot wake up silently.
Uh 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,

(11:12):
not heroes. Well you do see, Yeah, the I mean,
I think I think it falls on both sides. I
guess the heroes that are seeking silence, they tend to
want to 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

(11:33):
of silence that will better your life, whereas the monsters
are a little more selfish. Well, one great example of
this is the enemy a leash the creation myth of
ancient Mesopotamia, which you see in ancient Sumerian and Babylonian texts.
Originally at Sumerian focused on the god in Leal. Later
the Babylonian version is altered to glorify the Babylonian god

(11:53):
mar Duke. But the story is pretty much that the
gods Apsu and Tiamat freshwater and salt water 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, irritating noise, and Opsu, in

(12:14):
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 has to come and fight

(12:36):
these beings. Actually, so Opsu 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. It's in it always

(12:57):
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, because he
he quite famously is not a fan of the noise,
not a fan of the partying that's coming from the

(13:19):
mead hall across the way, right. 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,

(13:43):
virtually no physical descriptions um, which 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 fast nous, a fiend in hell. This
ghastly demon was named Grendel, infamous stalker of the marches

(14:07):
who held the Moor's finn and desolate stronghold, the land
of the marsh Monsters. Nice. I always liked that the
way 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 roamer, walker of
the world's weird wall. Oh, that's so great, and that

(14:29):
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 he's a jerk, basically he is.
But also it's because Grendel comes into Rothgar's mead hall

(14:52):
and and messes him up. He comes in and kills
He does kill a lot of a lot of people
in the uh in the Damon's the sense. Yeah, so
why does he come into the meat 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.

(15:13):
So one translation reads quote 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

(15:34):
opinions on this. Whether the text means that Grendel was
actually jealous of the Danes, you know, friendship and happiness,
their their camaraderie and the party, or merely that he
just couldn't stand the noise. The sound of it bothered him.
But is it the same question we ask ourselves when
whenever we're annoyed by a neighbor having a loud party?
Am I annoyed because they are loud and I want

(15:56):
to sleep right now? Where am I loud because I
was not invited? Or I am not invited to parties
like this anymore? That that line of questioning, well, it
might be hard to tell the difference. Yeah, 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 folks these days, and so

(16:17):
anytime I read or if we end up viewing The Grinch,
Who's still Christmas, the comparisons are are 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,

(16:38):
and the same thing happens with the Grinch. The Grinch
hates the noise of the Christmas season, even the g
r is there. Yea, it seems like it's got to
be intentional, right, Oh, the noise, noise, noise, noise, noise.
There's 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 uh, you know, coming

(17:00):
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, and the joy being the cause of
their noise. But of course that backfires and he has
to remove Christmas. 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 Grendel. Grendel, I

(17:24):
believe his head shrinks many sizes that day. Yeah, but
well I'm not sure he gets his head cut off. Yeah.
Also of 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 they
hit his blood. Description, there's some descriptions that can be

(17:45):
interpreted that either Grendel's blood is acidic and is eating
through the blade or it is so hot that it
is 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

(18:07):
level of power by trying to shut them up, just
wanting silence. And and if we can only find a
room for Grendel, 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 a childhood variant of

(18:30):
the Egyptian god Horace. But ultimately Hippocrates is really more
about secrets than silence. 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

(18:51):
who called the Silence, but I looked at them up
and found that their name is somewhat misleading. Oh what
do they do? Uh? They engineer history and cause people
to have mass 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. What

(19:12):
did you ever watch Buffy? No? I actually didn't. Should
It's a lot of fun. You know, you kind of
have to plow through that first season, but but 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

(19:33):
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.
And then we finally learned that if you the reason
here is because loud noises such as those caused by
a screaming human, caused the creatures heads to explode. Now

(19:55):
that's funny. You should mention it, because one thing we
do know is that loud no 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. You know various uh, various humans, I
mean humans even, but also playing of non human animals. Uh.
The distraction alone can put many prey animals at an

(20:17):
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. 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

(20:41):
like dynamite fishing for squid, right right, Yeah, essentially, so
they're they're blasting out these uh, these low frequency pulses
and then dead squid start up, start just popping up,
and they seem to have extensive bodily damage. And uh
when they looked closer, they found that like their mantles
were reduced pulp, there was bruised muscles, lesions in their statusists,

(21:03):
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 further and found that low frequency
sound exposure intensities between a hundred fifty seven hundred seventy
five decibels and frequency range which is very loud. Should say, Yeah,

(21:27):
one of the things to drive home and throw some
throughout some comparisons here in a bit is that, yeah, underwater, uh,
sounds can really get up there. Some of our loudest
noises on Earth they're occurring underwater. Um. But but anyway,
in this experiment, found that that there was a great
deal of UH statusist tissue damage, including the destruction of

(21:49):
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 various salivods that they studied,
the ones that survived the experiment exhibited in some cases
visible holes in the tissues. So we're talking, you know,
legitimate kind Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean the worst. If

(22:13):
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, 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?

(22:35):
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 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

(22:55):
pretty cool There was a popular science article by seth
ET's horror at that came out a few years back,
and he looked into this. Include but 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.

(23:17):
Because uh infrasound is essentially a hell of a thing.
So if you crank it up to 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 hundred and forty decibels,

(23:38):
you can get the skull to resonate destructively. Especially it's
especially the case if you're using 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

(23:59):
course they and you earth object colliding with the Earth.
It's heard around the world, perhaps the loudest single event
in modern history, and it probably hit three hundred to
three so loud stuff. So we've never seen anybody's head
explode from sound. No And I think the way that,

(24:19):
the way that Horowitz explained it is that if you
were setting there, you if you had the technology to
do it, 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

(24:42):
can find it. And one piece that I came across
that I thought was pretty interesting was a short article
in High Country News, 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 prime very
purveyor of noise, which it usually is. But leaving the

(25:03):
city doesn't always mean heading to a place of quiet.
Of course. I think about William Butler Yates Lake Isle
of innist Free. He wants to get away from the
bustle of the city. But 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

(25:25):
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 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

(25:47):
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 of silence sort of highlights
an underlying lack of islands. 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

(26:08):
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 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

(26:29):
off from two fifty miles away. That's just crazy. They
also put together, the National Park Service put together a
map of America with color coding for 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.

(26:51):
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 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 leaves and stuff like that. Probably the quietest place
I can ever remember being was the desert in southwest Texas.

(27:15):
At Big Ben National Park where there was this one
day where I was riding around in a car with
my wife 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

(27:38):
wind or leaves. The air was very still. I just
heard 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

(28:00):
where in New England, stay out of the Midwest. Don't
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
it kind of flat landscape and a lot of highways.
You can 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

(28:23):
with reference 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
have actually tried to measure this. For example, I found
oneten study in the Lancet that said, quote, Observational and

(28:45):
experimental 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

(29:06):
additive or something, we would be freaking out. Yeah, you
know there. I believe that 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 have a detrimental effect on
on On one hand, I'm just communicating with the kid

(29:26):
and like getting their attention because even though you're cool,
with some 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

(29:46):
in front of me right now, but it's interesting. But
even but even then, the noise that we take for granted,
the stuff that's not noise, the stuff that we the
adults put on 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

(30:10):
like cortisol. And of course these hormones 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

(30:30):
talking like horns, honking um, things out of the ordinary,
things that your mind hasn't had a chance to sort
of program into the normal rate 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

(30:50):
them all the time, but I almost never register them, uh,
And they never interfere with my in my sleep or anything,
unless there's a sound that that happens that's out of
the ordinary, some sort of occasionally there's like this huge
shuddering um stop to a train it's making its way through.
But other than that, I legitimately haven't really heard the

(31:12):
train in a distractive manner since the day I moved
into the house. Well, there's 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 eleven, the World Health Organization
they put together this big report and they were collecting

(31:34):
evidence on the public health risks posed by noise in
European Union 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 here. So how many healthy years

(31:54):
is this issue taking off of people's lives? You can
measure a lot of negative health UH 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,

(32:15):
forty five thousand years for cognitive impairment of children, nine
hundred and three thousand years for sleep disturbance, twenty two
thousand years for tenadis 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 noise in the

(32:37):
western part of Europe. Well, that's a good thing. I
turned on that white noise 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

(33:00):
notice the you know, the 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,

(33:23):
as far as 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 wall that was once white. So like,
all right, it's got some smears on it, it's got
some scuffs. I could try and clean it down, I

(33:46):
could try and go back to that that that white level.
I could try and subscribe 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. Sorry, I'm mixing my metaphors here, but
I don't know. I see what you're saying. A new
um and a new seamless sound. Uh, you know, base
level of noise that has no no variety. They're not

(34:09):
going to be any sudden Uh 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 certainly don't
want to hear anything the cats up to. So I

(34:31):
would rather just just go ahead and put up this
wall of sound you don't want to hear. Your 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 things that
actually inspired me to do this episode was it was

(34:51):
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 this two
thousand six study in the journal Heart by a scientist

(35:15):
named Luke 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 is that
they were intending to study physiological effects of different types

(35:36):
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 stelic blood pressure, circulation in
the brain, and they were trying to figure out, you know,

(35:58):
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 intervals
of silence were introduced as a control to the tests.

(36:21):
So these periods of silence had a physiologically measurable 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
experience was the palate cleanser between courses, you know, the

(36:42):
crackers or the sorbet or whatever. Is 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 I think it's
a fine movie. It's a great science fiction film. But
there's a scene where we're Putty tang the the the
the title character, who is himself an accomplished musician and

(37:05):
just sort of cultural phenomenon um. He goes around winner. Yeah,
it's 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 performs a track
of pure silence and and it becomes a sensation. And

(37:25):
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,
the constant music on top of all book sounds around us.
That an actual silence, some force meditation it maybe even
like essentially a two minute interval of silence enforced on
everyone would have a profound impact. Well, yeah, it's Putti

(37:47):
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, it might be just like
random turned on radios or complete silence or something like that.
And it's it's easy to make jokes about that. You know,
you go to a classical music concert and sit there

(38:07):
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 easy to make
fun of. But another interesting fact here about the study,

(38:32):
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 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

(38:55):
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, 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,

(39:19):
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.
Everything goes silent for a second and then the sound
comes back before they drop the drop, right, Yeah, like
the drop that the dub step drop or even of course, um,
what was it that the Beatles song with the famous drop.

(39:44):
I'm not sure which day in the life, right is
that the one? Oh? I know what that song, but
I can't remember if there's a drop in it where
there's like everything gets very loud and then suddenly just
like in silence. Our Beatles fans will have to when
if I'm wrong, But but certainly their example of this
throughout music the drop totally well, I mean it does

(40:08):
focus the mind. The rests are as important as the beats.
But of course the finding that the brain responds mainly
to contrast and 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

(40:28):
finding about how the brain reacts to silence. So the
interesting fact is that the brain processes silence is a
distinct type of 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.

(40:49):
So the researchers monitored the brains of rats exposed to
bursts of sound and charted the brain activity for wind
sounds began and when sounds ended. And what they found
was that acts used to 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

(41:12):
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 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 communication?

(41:32):
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 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

(41:55):
ever thought about how unnerving it is to hear a
sudden silence yes, I have Joe, 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

(42:18):
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 I mean,
if it's the robot with a mini gun, you don't
have much of a good chance. But so, how do
animals know when to be afraid? Well, decent question, and

(42:39):
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 organism. Right. And the
question is is that sort of a universal language, an
instinctual universal language among animals, And it looks like it
might be so. One way, of course, and most can

(43:00):
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
calls or pheromones. But there was a study in two
thousand twelve in Current Biology called silence resulting from the

(43:21):
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 hear walking,
talking here, moving along through the brush. When whenever that
goes quiet, animals instinctively become afraid. They know something's wrong. Uh.

(43:42):
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 that it becomes across species language like you're you're not.
You don't have to listen to your own uh, cod

(44:04):
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 to come back on the other side, there is
another biological role that silence seems to play and it's

(44:27):
a positive nurturing one toward brain development. So there's study
by im Key Kirsty in brain structure and function called
is silence golden effects of auditory stimuli and their absence
on adult hippocamp ll neurogenesis. So this essentially linked silence
to brain development. And they tested four different sound conditions,

(44:51):
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. Uh. But then they also
compared this to white noise that they might have gone
with brown noise, but 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

(45:13):
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 growth neuro genesis in the hippocampus.
But after seven days, only silence was still associated with

(45:34):
this brain cell growth, and that was a total surprise.
But the author's right quote. Our results indicate that the
unnatural absence of auditory inputs, as well as spectro temporally
rich albeit ethologically irrelevant stimuli, activate precursor cells in the
case of silence, also leading to greater numbers of newborn

(45:56):
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 other background noises. It's interesting

(46:18):
when you we need when you take that into account
thinking about our own uh 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 that's part
of the problem. You want you it's going to occupy itself.

(46:40):
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 freedom from noise.

(47:02):
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.

(47:23):
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?

(47:43):
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 form,
you know, for for one thing, because what I'm engaging
with with actual silence. I'm also very engaging to varying

(48:05):
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

(48:25):
mind are like wilderness environments. They were not necessarily quiet.
Like one was like, um, kind of on top of
the mountain and 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

(48:46):
across the trees and the and the rocks. Uh that
there was a sound 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 colored my interpretation

(49:12):
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 of
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 of quiet places, I

(49:34):
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, engineered entirely

(49:57):
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 a floor to ceiling. Oh yeah. I camped in
okay Finoki swamp here in Georgia several years back, went

(50:18):
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, were just so
incredibly loud. 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. Yeah, and in

(50:41):
a sense it is. But it's but again that that
kind of that that's why 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 a lot I've with with worry
and concerns and what ifs than uh than any other time.

(51:05):
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 wonderful ambient album, and every

(51:28):
time I listened to it, or and or every time
I'm in an actual airport, 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 form of silence that works better
in an airport as opposed to be the the the

(51:52):
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. Even even if you put in ear plugs

(52:13):
and you you know, you're 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 gonna receive those uh, those waves you're
certainly gonna hear with your skull uh to a large degree.
So yeah, you're not gonna be able to to to

(52:34):
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.
That's a hard thing to pull off, right, because you
can isolate somebody, you can put them in solitary, you
can go u you know, Cold War John C. Lily

(52:55):
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

(53:15):
I read about known 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 times, no talking. Well, that sounds absolutely dreadful, absolutely shredful. Well, anyway,

(53:39):
the idea, 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,

(54:02):
I mean, 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
bet is that this did not work, though it does

(54:23):
sound like, you know, perfectly deplorable from you know, by
nineteenth century penal standards. I mean, I think I think
it sort 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

(54:44):
and that's it. And I 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 yeah,
I mean it's you're not necessarily making any positive movement there.

(55:07):
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, that's
another You've done an episode of this show before. It

(55:30):
was also several years ago in the Spiral Silence, which
is not not so much about sound but just about
not speaking up, 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 research indicates
that solitary confinement is just a brutal tactic to use

(55:52):
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, of course,

(56:13):
that's when silence is imposed upon you, inflicted upon you.
But but certainly they're there are plenty of models for
embracing silence, taking on vows of silence, certainly. Uh. 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,

(56:37):
even the Greek philosopher of Pythagoras of Samos imposed a
rule of silence on his uh disciples of Pythagora, in
silence stints of five years or more, even to prove
your commitment. Apparently 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. Uh in the world,

(56:59):
place silence in study, you know here at 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 bid and you were
here at at the time we have these big but
six years yeah, it was still in the same office.
So it was like sort of big three sided cubicles,

(57:22):
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 have your computer, and you were
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 of different offices since then, and things

(57:44):
have gotten more open office, as is the trend right
where the ideas that oh, we're gonna 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 energy. Easel will just free flow
and ricochet around the office. Man, there is nothing more

(58:04):
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 an office environment work better their individuals
for whom it works better. Um. I think the problem
is always we need try applying any kind of one

(58:24):
size fits all um plan to a workforce. Well, it
seems to me 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 there have been some papers in recent

(58:47):
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 piece and quiet at
that he was afforded in the nineteen sixties, which resulted
in his Nobel Prize winning work, is no longer possible,

(59:08):
you know. So you have you have a number of
scientists over the years who have really been um the
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 their lives. Well,

(59:30):
not to mention how much they'd be required 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,
whether you have a dog, door something. Let's get some
let's point some some cameras at that. Facebook wants to
know what is this? Yes? Why am I seeing this? Who?

(59:55):
Who are you? Uh? Well, it's the world. It's the world.
We have the world we have to deal with. Uh,
and we'll we'll find a way to work through the noise.
I mean that's the 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 still going to have to work through the noise. Well,
I mean that brings us back to the to the question.

(01:00:17):
I guess the core questions 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. So you're increasing

(01:00:38):
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. 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 know, for fun, just for fun.

(01:01:00):
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,

(01:01:20):
what is the quietest place 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

(01:01:40):
number of ambient decibels? Be very interested to hear, Hey,
maybe you've 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

(01:02:01):
of these things and didn't really bother you? I want
to hear about that. I mean, there are people who
who are noisy enough and or make enough noises just
moving around, uh 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

(01:02:21):
more than you know, you're probably not gonna notice the
desk about how we'll show all them, show all there
griping about your office 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,

(01:02:42):
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. We're gonna be there, We're gonna be doing
a presentation. It's gonna be Star Treky, it's gonna be science,
it's gonna be a little cosmic, it's gonna be a
will uh psychological. Yeah. So the conference goes from September

(01:03:04):
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,
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 of the podcast, the videos,

(01:03:26):
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 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

(01:03:53):
and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works
dot com. Ayther Ynys starts four starts apart f

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