The Substance of Silence

And one of the examples of this is that there is no such substance in physics as cold, right, Cold is just the absence of heat energy. And yet if you 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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

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. 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 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 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 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,

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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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?

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 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. 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, 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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

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. 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.

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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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

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,

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.

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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. 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 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

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. 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 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? 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 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 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 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 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

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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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. 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? 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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.

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 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 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 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

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 and drop somebody in an isolation tank. But for the most partly people have a right to be loud, and

people can be loud outwardly and certainly inwardly. You know, I don't usually think of a prison as a place that's going to be especially a refuge of peace and quiet. But in the nineteenth century there was this regime that I read about known 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, 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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? 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. 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 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. But I don't want to necessarily live in an environment of pure oxygen and breathe it all the time. That would kill you. But but but every now and then

I'll sleep in my specialized oxygen tent. Uh and uh, and it will revitalize me. But hey, that's uh, that's our take on the topic. We we put it to you, though, what is the quietest place you have ever found yourself in? What what's the quietest place you've visited? What is the quietest place you have created for yourself in your own life?

And I guess the question is a dual question, right, what's the place that has felt the most quiet to you, like the ideal mind silence versus what's actually the lowest number of ambient decibels? Be very interested to hear, Hey, maybe you've even been to one of these, uh, these soundless chambers that we've created in the world. I want to hear from the people, and I know they've got to be out there, the people who went in one and did not get all freaked out, because I'm sure

there are some people. I'm sure we hear about the ones that get freaked out. Have you been to one of these things and didn't really bother you? I want to hear about that. I mean, there are people who who are 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 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, 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

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, 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 and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com. Ayther Ynys starts four starts apart f