Noise Pollution: Arrrgh!

don't know if I told you, thank you. I think you're doing great too. Um, I don't know if I told you that I had trouble remembering how to um what six plus seven added together to the other day? That sounds familiar? That really bother? Yeah, and that's like my favorite number, and it's like I just couldn't do it. I was putting my daughter to bed the other night, and as she was going to sleep, literally falling asleep, daddy, what's four plus four? Eight? Was six plus two? It's

also eight? Okay. She's learning math, and you know that first stuff you learn is literally just that simple addition, and it's just funny to think about, like, wow, that's what's on her mind right now. Yeah, but also she's learning acceptance too, just unquestioning. Can I tell people how you spelled this document that you sent my way for this noise pollution episode? Sure? Boy, you're just playing it all out there, aren't you. It was fun because it

looked like a heavy metal band. It was n O I Z E p O I think it was p O L l U s h U n Y and looking at him and pay for I was like, oh, man, that's that's a good bad band name. It is, like that's a that's a good name for a made up band in a movie like Wild Stallions. Yes, and yeah, although that's tough to compete with, you know it is. Um. I also think we should, uh, we should give a

little c o ay here. I think it's impossible for you and I not to turn into old man complaining about like loud music and loud mufflers and stuff in this episode. So it's gonna happen. I think everybody who knows us and saw the title of this one knew it was going to happen. But let's just put it on the table now. Well and It's also funny you

mentioned this because I did mention noise pollution. I introduced that concept to my daughter the other day and said, you know, she was like, well, what's that and I said, well, it's it's as bad as trash on the road, but it's noise that's doing it and you should be aware. And she was like, okay, um. And I guess it never occurred to me that like loud noises for kids, unless it's something that really bothers them, it's just part of life. Sure, it definitely seems to become more bothersome

the older you get. Absolutely. I think I don't know why, but I'm going to hypothesize that it's because you grow to learn that it doesn't have to be that way, and if you come to really resent the things and the people who are making it. So yeah, and I think that's why people One reason people retire to the country or something like that, if they've lived in the city, their whole life just a little more tranquil, perhaps even

bucolic lifestyle quieter. And there's a lot of science behind It's not just like oh, I don't want to hear those noises. As you will see throughout this episode it is it's bad for your health. Hey, speaking of retirement, have you seen that documentary on the Villages? It is bonkers. Yeah, I saw it um actually when I had COVID when

on a documentary binge, and that was one of them. Man, it was like one of the most disturbing documentaries I've ever seen, and I've seen like dear Zachary, and somehow it was like up there with it. It was good man that I mean, I don't want to give anything, but the one guy that was you know, this sort of discosta that was It's kind of funny at first, but then that got really sad to a lot of a lot of layers and all of it was incredibly sad that it was highly recommended. Yeah, just bizarre, man.

And then I was watching the credits and I saw Darren aaron Oski was an executive producer. I'm like, okay, you go. Now, thing suddenly clicked a little more. I thought a great idea for a movie would be a

setting like that. You couldn't call it that because it's I'm sure proprietary, but the town said, yeah, a setting just like that where they wake up one day and there's been a murder and then like you know, col McLaughlin, it's kind of a twin peaksy thing, you know, the stranger from a strange land comes in to investigate a murder in a very unlikely place and all the sort of or does there I think that would be a

cool movie or TV show. Well, I mean that is Twin Peaks basically, right, But you could if you said it in a retirement community in Florida, people, you could just walk away dust in your hands off, like job. Well, there's plenty of things that have done this. It's not just Twin Peaks, sure, I know, just nobody did it better than Twin Peaks. I A um, alright, so noise pollution.

I think the fact of the podcast to me came right up front, and that I never thought of the fact that a decibel was a tenth of a bull or a bell, which his name is DECI right there. Yeah, I know, I've never thought of it either, because you never hear of any other variation. It's like one decibel, ten decibles, a hundred decibles, you know. Um. And apparently a bowl or bell b E L is named after

Alexander Graham Bell too. I didn't know that either. And the reason why we why a decibel is used, which is one tenth of a bell um, is because a decibel, a one tenth of a bell difference in sound is the lowest, the smallest difference that humans can detect. So we trade in decibles here on, and we trade in an algorithm when we talked decibles, because it's one of those weird things where it's not like a hundred decibles, is it twice as loud as fifty decibles. It's spit

into an equation that's actually one dred thousand times as loud. Yeah, So so like ten decibles, the difference between ten decibles and twenty decibles is twenty decibles is ten times louder. The difference between ten decibles and thirty decibles, thirty decibles is a hundred times louder. It's logarithms and zero dbs as we'll call them. That is the threshold of human hearing period. And a hundred and forty decibels is about where you can start to experience literal physical pain from

a sound. Yeah, I saw between a hundred and twenty and a hundred and forty. Yeah, it ranges like uh, I mean I've been to some loud concerts and small venues. Yeah, Dinosaur Junior at Variety Theater was it for me. I was just about to say, Dinosaur Junior, they're one of the legendary loud bands. It was insane. It is super loud, but it's not like I don't remember feeling pain, but I do remember feeling discomforted a couple of these where I was like, jeez, this is like I like my

music loud, but this is a little much. Dude. Yeah, like I don't wear your plugs. I wore your plugs in that. And I was like, I'm saving myself right now. It was so loud, and I meant to say Variety Playhouse is not Variety Theater. Yeah, because we played there before. We don't want a dis no, I know you know that. But all of this to say, um god bless Jay Mascus. Yeah, no, it was great, but it was really loud. What about this conversation that we're having. What is that? Well, it

depends a normal conversation something around sixty decibls. And I saw that that's people standing about a meter apart um speaking without raising their voices. That's sixty decibles right there. For a reference, What about a car. Cars are about ten times louder to ten hundred to a thousand times louder than normal conversation, depending on the car of the truck, between seventy and ninety deciples. What about an airplane, So you would think, okay, a normal conversation is sixty decibles,

airplane being a hundred twenty desciples is twice as loud. No, my friend, it's it's a hundred thousand times louder. An airplane is a hundred thousand times louder than a normal conversation if it reaches a hundred and twenty decibles. All right, If you've ever been on a tarmac, uh like a live tarmac and heard a plane kind of landing or taking off, you that's just some loud stuff. Yes, and

that's why they wear those cans on their ears. Yeah, they and they definitely should because we're starting to realize that there's all sorts of hearing loss, sides of the traditional ones that you can pick up on a regular hearing test. There's something called hidden hearing loss that we're just starting to get our mind around, where the structure of your hearing apparatus in your ear, the little sillia that's almost like a venus fly trap trigger hair, but

for sound instead. Um like, those things can be intact, but the neurons that form the chain between your ear and your brain can be permanently damaged so that the sound that gets to your brain is garbled or or partially missing. And that's a huge thing that can happen

at much lower intensity than than we understood before. And speaking of intensity, I think we should say real quick, a decibel to us humans, we we basically talk in decibels as like a measure of volume, because that's what it appears to like us, like an increase in decibels is an increase in the volume of the sound. But really what a decibels measuring is the intensity of the disturbance of an air of the air that's something has made. So if you're really close to that disturbance, it's going

to be a very intense exposure to your ear. If you're further away, it's going to be a much less intense intense exposure because it kind of dissipates over distances. But to you, it's just registering is a difference in volume, where really it's a difference in the intensity of the wave that's being produced that's traveling through the air. That's right. And uh, this is all sound. Yes, that's not noise. Noise is different. Noise is what we're talking about. Mainly.

A noise is classified as unwanted sound. Yeah, that can vary depending on who you are, obviously. Uh, you know, the sound of your significant other's voice after forty years, maybe noise to you asking for some tea. The sound of a Harley Davidson motorcycle being rebbed up in front of your house might be noise. Or those uh, those blowers that used to hay until you love and use. I still don't love it, and I went battery powered, but it's still even while I'm using, I'm like, I'm

a terrible person. But you get it done quickly, probably right, so quick, so quick. I'm like mincing and prancing, just getting in ton Uh. And there's a lot of kinds of different noise. Um. Sometimes, like let's say you work in a in a machine shop or something and you use a machine, like the the sound the machine makes is like it's not necessary, but it's it's a byproduct. Uh, it's a result of the machine. Working correctly. It's not like, well,

let's just make this thing loud. It's like, well, I'm sorry that Jackammer is going to be loud, because that's just the way it goes. My friends are are Jackammer. Episode is fantastic. Um. So that sound isn't necessarily noise, but the intensity and repetition of that sound makes it becomes noise. Yeah. Yeah, it's an unwanted intensity, or it can just the sound existing itself, like you're saying, like a leafblower, just an unwanted existence of sound. So either way,

the operative thing is it's unwanted sound. That's the key, right. Yeah. And and this is another cool fact of the episode I think is that, uh they they think that as late as through the nineteen forties and into nineteen fifty, natural sounds were still the dominant sounds that you heard,

um and then things really changed. Yeah, because there's a there's a big qualifier that a lot of researchers make that and not everybody does, But that noise is by definition human caused, like either we're yelling or whatever, um or one of the machines that we've created is making noise. But that you wouldn't say, like the sound of that waterfall is noise. Like we don't think of like natural

sounds typically as noise. It's just sounds. And as we'll see, it's probably because we have been living, like our species has been living around those sounds and has definitively excluded them as threatening, so that there they don't They don't produce like an irritation in us. They just are sound, almost regardless of how intense they are, right and that and again that irritation is subjective because that rock concert

that I enjoy, someone else might call that noise. That uh, that Space Shuttle launch that is super loud might be noise to some people, but to others, you know, it's the same sound, but they they don't think of it as noise because they're excited and exhilarated in the moment to see and hear that thing. Yeah. So you know the other night, Uh, the inspiration for um crew came back on the Dragon Capsule. Did you watch that? No?

Did you? Did you see it live? Uh? We didn't see it because they splashed down in the Atlantic, but we heard the sonic boom it made when it came back into the atmosphere over Florida. It was a stounding Did you see that sonic boom? No? I didn't. Oh, it's really good. It starts off like, oh god, this is not good. This is like a terrible corporate ad, and then it really starts to find its feet. It's it's crazy how it evolves over like just the first

couple episodes. I gotta see it. It's good. It's definitely worth seeing. Um what other kinds of noise. You've got industrial noise, which that's classified as kind of from the beginning of the process all the way to the end of any kind of industrial process, and that's basically called continuous noise. Uh, from you know, raw materials all the way to the to the end disposal of whatever byproducts

can usually cause a lot of racket. Yeah. So like you know, like um, like a generator humming or something like that. There's not a lot of variation in intensity. It's basically this um or steam being released or even like a rhythmic like um, like a like something being like hammered, no, not hammered. That a difference that's called the impulsive noise. But um, just something that doesn't really vary. It's just kind of a monotonous sound. That's that's this

kind of a subcategory called continuous sound. And it just so happens that most industrial processes are continuous in nature, right, whereas a train going by your house, or a plane flying or a car going by or a siren is intermittent. Yeah. And then also you could probably say, like if you held the trigger down on a backpack leafblower, um, which again is the worst thing that anyone's ever invented, but if you held it down, that would be a continuous sound for the whole time it was going. But no

one does that ever. They just rev in this rhythmic pattern that your brain is just just giving. It's all to trying to try to find a pattern in. And so you get worn out and irritated so quickly because of those things, because they don't follow rhyme or reason. And in conjunction with that, it's an intermittent sound, so, which is, from what I can tell, one of the worst sounds for us. Right. And then you've also got community noise, which is just people noise. I think the

leafblowers are thrown into that lawnmowers. Uh. You know, if you've got a festival in your neighborhood, or fireworks on the Fourth of July, or people playing their music in their cards and their houses. This is all just sort of people generated, generated community sound. So those are basically the three categories that I saw, industrial trafficking community. Should we take a break? I think we should. All right, We'll be right back. I'm gonna go quiet down that

racket outside. I'll be right back. Okay, do you finish shaking your fist at those teenagers on your lawn. I'm lucky because we don't have loud We don't have one neighbor on one side, and our neighbor beside us is pretty quiet. But I do live near and I've talked about it before, a pretty main road, and you you kind of get used to it. But I also yearn you know, to be a few blocks in. But you know, you can't pick up your house and move it. So what are you gonna do? You get used to it?

You can, but it's really expensive. Well, no, that is true. You can move a house sometimes. Didn't we do an episode on that once? How to Move a House? Yeah? I think I don't know if we did one just on that. It may been like historic districts or something. I don't know. And by the way, that episode we couldn't think of the other day was crumple zones. Oh boys, So we did do a whole episode on crumple zones. We did. Boy, we were scraping the bottom of the

barrel there. But I remember that being an interesting episode though. It was totally interesting. Well that's the stuff you should know, way, isn't it, Chuck? Uh? It is? Indeed, should we talk about hearing damage? Yeah, So, like I was saying, there's that the kind of new type of hearing damage that we're wrapping our minds around. That is like the death of the neurons that are supposed to transmit the electrical impulse to the brain, and so we don't hear very well.

Our our communication is garbled, and yet you can pass a traditional hearing tests no problem. Um. But other research is really starting to unfold, like less um less predictable ways that that noise and noise pollution actually affects our health. And it's like our entire system is negatively affected by noise and noise exposure. It is, and it it basically at the beginning of the whole process is triggering the

same exact thing that triggers your fight or flight response. Uh, Like you're gonna have the same reaction to you know, if you hear uh a siren go by, the same thing is happening in your as far as your brain knows. Then what happens if like a bear walks up to you and roarers. Yeah, So, like our our hearing is always on and it's always on the lookout for, um, a potential threat. And one of the ways that a potential threat can give itself away is by making a sound. Right.

It was, like I was saying earlier, Like we've been around waterfalls and the sound of waves in our evolutionary history for so long that basically it seems like when you're born, you come equipped with this. Don't worry about that sound. Actually you can be soothed by it. It's not something that should stimulate your fight or flight response.

But we've lived around industrial machinery and the sound of a text message or a leaf blower, the stupid leaf blowers for such a little amount of our evolutionary history that our minds are not at all attuned to those things or um, we haven't kind of adopted this idea that a leafblower is non threatening and so it stimulates the fight flight response and is when we hear it.

That's right, So you're gonna hear that sound, you're amygdala, which we've talked about plenty uh contributes to emotional processing, is going to send that same distress signal to the hypothalamus. Again, that gets if you are in a fight or flight response, which is why you probably want to run screaming if you here too many sirens, you're here too many leaf blowers, and then that's gonna signal your adrenal glands to get your adrenaline going. And I believe cortisol gets going as well.

It's like literally mimicking fight or flight. Yeah, And so they figured out that like people who are continuously chronically exposed to sound, like say people who live like really close to an airport, really close to the subway tracks, or um, people who work in a really noisy factory, they have all sorts of crazy random health problems, like their kids sometimes have low birth weight. Obviously, they can

develop tonitus um heart disease, obesity, diabetes, UH. There, their children who are exposed to to chronic noise can have UM cognitive impairments, um, high blood pressure, like all sorts of crazy stuff. And so you think, well, okay, that's that's like, that's terrible anybody who has to live near noise or work near noise, like we should do something about that. But it's even worse than that, Like, noise pollution is even more insidious than that, because you don't

have to be chronically exposed to it. You don't have to live in a place where you're like, this is an objectively noisy place that I live or work in to still suffer from the effects of noise pollution. Yeah, I mean it can affect you when you're sleep because, like you said, your ears are always on. It's not like you go to sleep and the ears say, well, I'm gonna take a nice break. That would be a fantastic evolutionary addaptation. Actually, well, actually it would these days.

It wouldn't be the mountains, the mountain lions, saber tooth tiger days. Yeah. Nice. If there was a switch and you could kind of control that, it would be so nice. I think the switches, the white noise wave machine is that switch, Yeah, which I've gotten addicted to such that I have to travel with him now. Yeah, everywhere I go I've heard that. Yeah. Basically, once you start, you can't go back. Yeah, I like it, though, I do. Brown noise is my drug of choice. It sounds so

gross though brown. Yeah. I make a brown noise every morning, you know what I mean? Wow, I was not expecting danger Field to make an appearance. Well that's what you meant, right, poop or no? Yeah, I mean I guess anytime I hear brown, I think it's poop. You know, you think of that or you think of ween the band, did they have a brown song or album? They talk about the brown thing, the brown sound, and brown is just sort of their color and how they used to talk

about sound. And I've heard other groups talk about brown sounds. So what does brown sound sound like? Well, brown noise, you know if white noises, brown noises o middle. Yeah, it's sort of a lower lower end. And if you actually play it through a speaker, like if you put it on your phone and play it through a little bluetooth, you can get some good base and it just it really works. Wonders for me. I should try brown noise

or even white noise. I've been using um chrome noise where it's like, kid, do do do do do, And it's really not helping me sleep at all. You're like, you're like, I have the sound of a early Internet connection being made a constant um. Did they ever name that? They should have named that great? Yeah, I don't know. I just call it whatever it was. They called it the ticket wichet um. Interrupted sleep, though, that's that's the big problem, or one of the big problems, because your

ears are always on. If you have uninterrupted sleep or poor sleep overall, you're gonna be tired. Obviously, your creativity, memory can get impaired. Your creativity is going to be low. You're gonna have impaired judgment, your psychomotor skills might be impacted. You might have more headaches. They've done studies. If you live near airports and stuff like that, or uh, you know, next to like a rail yard, you're gonna have more headaches.

You might take more sleeping pills as a result. Um, you might be more prone to minor accidents, and you are going to be more prone to seek uh psychiatric treatment in your life. They like studies have shown this. Yeah, there's a study of people living near European airports. They found a tendestible increase in aircraft noise was associated with a twenty eight percent increase in anxiety medication, and that people um were also likelier to have more likely to

have symptoms of depression. So again all this is just from like having not good sleep, which is bad enough, but apparently Chuck it even gets worse because even if your sleep isn't disturbed where you're waking up and not getting sleep because of noise, like you get used to it, the noise is still affecting you while you're sleeping because again, your ear never turns off. It's always on the listen out for some sort of threat creeping up on you.

And so if you're exposed to noise while you're sleeping,

it's still has that stress effect on you. And what they've figured out is that one of the problems of just being chronically stressed through something like noise and I think stress in general, is that UM it affects I think it's called the end athelium, which is the lining of your blood vessels, and they respond to chemicals that tell them to constrict to relax UM, and they get constricted when they get stressed, when they're exposed to stress

like cortisol or something like that comes along and says constrict. And when they do that, you get high blood pressure. You can end up with heart disease, you can end up suffering from heart attacks. And what's insane is they figured out that after one night of being exposed while you're sleeping to something like train sounds um your endothelium it starts suffering, like it doesn't function as well after

just one night of that. Right, Like, isn't the idea that you can have no other sort of poor health markers and it can actually be brought on because of this noise. Right, Yes, while you're sleeping, you're still getting sleep, but it's still happening to you while you're sleeping. And not only like high blood pressure um or um like a heart attack or something like that coming down the road,

but also like diabetes, obesity. There's a lot of things that we're figuring out are are tied to the lining of the blood vessels and whether they're healthy or not. It's a huge predictor of a whole range of diseases. And when you hear noise, that's your stressors trigger your endothelium to constrict, and that is a really bad thing. It is um here in the United States. We kind of started studying the stuff in earnest in the seventies.

That was when uh pollution was a big deal just all around in the United States, and we started to say things like, hey, maybe you shouldn't just um have a family picnic and then just uh pick up your blanket and dump all the trash on the ground like they did on that episode of Madmen and on Anchorman where they're all eating McDonald's And I saw a guy throw a fully like McDonald's thing out the window day the day and smashed on the sidewalk. Oh my god,

And I was just like, who who does that? Still, Yeah, that's the problem is is we're at a place in in our country's history where if you confront people like that, there's a chance you're gonna get shot for confronting someone like that. But I don't confront But that's like, that isn't the kind of behavior you should under normal circumstances, non shooting circumstances, feel perfectly fine confronting somebody about like what what is wrong with you? Like we're so far

beyond that, Like everyone knows you shouldn't do that. It's just insane. I got into a good fight with him in my brain. Yes, I know, Like what, like, where's the solution, where's the answer? I don't know, man. I think the zen path is you go pick up that McDonald's cup and throw it away and and say a prayer for that person good luck. Uh So. Yeah. New York uh is where they started studying this stuff in the seventies because it was kind of wrapped up, like

I said, folded into larger pollution studies. They're like, well, we might as well talk about noise pollution. New York is a place to do it, and they did. There were a couple of studies in the nineteen seventies about subway noise that really sort of gave put the whole thing on some terra firma as far as the health effects and and and learning effects. In the case of kids at PS ninety eight in Manhattan, it was very close to the train tracks there, the subway train track close. Yeah,

like two twenty feet away. And they found and this is this is pretty startling. They found that the kids that were closest to the train tracks were eleven months behind their classmates. That were on the other side of the school. Yeah, on like not in another school, just on the other side of the school. Yeah, almost a full well, I mean that is basically a full school year, because you know with summer's often stuff, that's an academic

year plus that they were behind. And they installed acoustic tiles in the classroom and some dampening devices, and they did a follow up study and the gap had closed basically, So I mean there's proof right there, like your kids are not learning as well if they're near that subway noise.

There's another kind of landmark study in the seventies in New York that established the concept of noise pollution at a place called the Bridges Apartment high rise or a cluster of them in Manhattan that I believe I've maybe drives under or really really close, um. And the traffic noise is so bad that even as high up as the eighth floor, the traffic sound is about the level

of a vacuum cleaner. And like just sitting in your apartment you have to raise your voice to be heard, um, which I mean, just the stress of that I can't imagine, Like that's an inhabitable, uninhabitable place. I believe people are still living there as well. UM. But the the this this study found that children living there were far behind it reading comprehension at listening comprehension uh, and just weren't learning as as quickly as other kids their age who

did not live in the bridges. So those two studies together from New York kind of established this idea like, Okay, there's a there's a real problem with noise pollution UM. And then it just went away for many, many years, is until about two thousand eleven when the WHO. There's a bunch of other studies, a lot of the other ones that we've restaurant so far came out around two thousand ten, two thousand eleven two. I'm not sure what exactly kicked it off, but there was a big spade

of them. But then the WHO released a really big report, not the WHO, the band, the World Health Organization. They're another loud band actually, and UM, yeah, they felt terribly guilty about causing hearing loss in their their fans, so they launched the study of UM uh basically all of

Western Europe. UM. They looked at UM I think something like five hundred different studies and did a meta analysis of them to calculate what's called the disability adjusted life years or dailies that were lost in Europe every year two noise pollution. Yeah, And the idea of a daily is they can't. They basically say, it's like the healthy years of your life that are end up being lost

to this human made noise that you're living with. And it's kind of a sort of an esoteric way to think about it, but once you wrap your head around it, it it makes a little bit more sense. But they found that at least one million healthy years of life are lost every single year only just in Europe due

to noise pollution. A million healthy years of people's lives annually. Yeah, And that that means because of all of the disease burden that noise pollution produces in humans, that that's how much of our our healthy lifespan is shaved off every year collectively, or how much Europe's is. And they did a follow up study in two thousand and eighteen, Chuck, and found that actually, no, we got it wrong. It's one point eight million dailies are lost in Western Europe

alone each year. So they definitely established through these this these couple of who studies like, no, noise pollution is still a thing and we should probably do something about on it. And there was another study that was released this past year that said, yes, dailies are significant, but we may have found a link that shows that noise

pollution can actually straight up kill you under some circumstances potentially. Yeah, And this one was this is pretty startling because they looked at herd Uh, well, not necessarily heart attack, but nighttime deaths. No, I guess it was heart attacks. But if you die overnight, die in your sleep quote unquote from heart attacks. Uh, and the link to commercial aircraft flying over your house, and I guess they had a way to sort of cancel out all the other factors.

And they got down to the nitty gritty that three of all nighttime deaths from heart attacks can be attributed to the sound of aircraft flying overhead while you're sleeping. That's just like that was it. That was the last stress response that your body could handle, and you had a heart attack and died from that sound. They said, like, Okay, we found a definite correlation, but if there is causation here, then we can chalk up about three percent of those

that's astounding. It is astounding. We're gonna take a break. That's the human grossness, and we'll talk about the awful things that we're doing to our animal friends in nature right after this, all right, Uh, we talked about a lot of studies that basically all added up to noise pollution very bad for human beings, like literally bad for their health. And and I know we've talked about a few of these before over the years, especially when it comes to whale. Uh, but all manner of mother nature

are impacted by this noise. They did a study in the early two thousands about stress hormones um for what kind of whales were they right whales? The right whales in the Bay of Fundy, And they saw and this was remarkable. They saw a really weird, unexplained declined in the stress hormone concentrations that went away and then came back up again. And they eventually realized it was a

halt in the shipping in the bay after eleven happened. Yeah, because shipping is probably humans noisiest marine endeavor that we do all the time constantly. And the idea of a break and that having being connected to a huge decline in stress hormones in whale poop. That's that's significant. But it was an accidental discovery, and I think it led other people to start studying stuff like that, like the effects of noise on wildlife. And there was US I

think University of Idaho. I'm sorry. If it's Idaho State, please don't be mad. I think it's okay. UM a study from two thousand twelve where researchers set up like what they call the Phantom Road, which is basically they have fixed a line of loudspeakers to some trees out in the wilderness that stretched about a half a mile in length, and um, they just played road and traffic noise and not like city stuff, just like the kind of stuff that possibly a remote road through the wilderness

would sound like. Because they recorded it in Glacier National Park on a road there, and just from that, just from like this rural Glacier National Park road noise, something like more than a quarter of all the birds in the area just left. They were like, we're moving, We're going to Canada. So everybody in the United States, Yeah, you know, I think I definitely noticed, and I heard other people talk about UM in like April of last year when things really slowed down commuter and traffic wise

due to the pandemic. And I don't think it was just um our our imaginations, but there were there was a lot more bird activity going on. Uh. And I remember I think I remember us even talking about it. Um or maybe it was just quieter for us, so we noticed the more or maybe a combination of both, but there was there was a difference. And when you know, when shipping stops after nine eleven or when um traffic stops, nature says, oh uh, the the human a holes are gone.

Now we can start behaving normally again. Yeah, like things are back to normal. Um. And that's I mean, that's just on land. Also, they found that Idaho study found that the birds that stuck around lost a bunch of weight which they would have needed to migrate, so maybe they couldn't leave even if they wanted to. But those that was the land study. There's been other studies on land.

But it seems like the the we're doing a lot of damage to marine ecosystems as well, like probably even more because sound waves travel and water a lot better than light, which means that most of the animals that live in the water have really sensitive hearing. That's what they've evolved to use to communicate and listen out for, right, So when we make noise, it's really problematic and marine ecosystems, Yeah,

and we make a lot of noise. I mean that shipping activity we talked about is super disruptive to anything underwater. When they search for mineral deposits on the sea floor or under the sea floor, they use these seismic air guns that are you can hear those things like a fish can hear that a thousand, thousands of miles away. Very disruptive. Um, sonar and no We talked about sonar in in an episode years ago and how that affected

marine life. I can't remember what it was. Did we do an entire episode on the time they blew up the beach to whale? Like what to do with the beach whale? Maybe? I think, but they basically kind of say now, like they think the reasons Wales beach themselves is because of these noises and sonar as a big culprit, right, Um, like it just drives him out of the water, which sounds bonkers, But if you ever think about how humans sometimes jump from tall buildings rather than being burned by

the intensity of a fire. I think it's virtually the same principle. Sure, so we are we have become aware of just how much noise pollution affects, not just us, but the environment as well. Like it's it is a form of pollution. Um. And it seems like you know, it started to accumulate in the last few years, but really we've known for a good fifty years that noise pollution is really bad for everybody. Uh, and yet we've

done almost nothing about it. But we had the start, Chuck, We started out like we were going to like almost immediately when we realized how bad noise pollution was in the seventies, we started to do something about it um and the federal government passed like th and actually I saw a fourth one um huge acts that had to

do with basically controlling noise pollution. Yeah, either controlling noise pollution for people in general, or through OSHA, making sure people were working in safe conditions or at least had you know, the ear cans and things they needed to work safely. And it was, like you said, it was headed in the right direction. We knew it was bad and we were trying to stop it. And then the Reagan administration came along and said, nuts to that, that's

federal regulation. Let's just leave it to the states, because you ask any governor of any state and they'll tell you their citizens know to do the right thing, and they'll do that right thing. And uh so we'll just leave it up to the states and let them. Uh

they volunteered to face itself out. The Office of Noise and Abatement Control, uh on paper still exists, but Congress said, you know, let's just not fund them anymore and let's keep these laws on the books, but really not worry about it too much because the states will take care of it, right, because states always do the right thing. Yeah, And the states, of course, did absolutely nothing, and it's

partially because they can't do a lot about it. A lot of noise is really best understood, studied, and regulated by the federal government. Like what like Georgia has a bunch of money reserve to study the effects of noise on humans. Like, no, that's totally a federal kind of thing to do, you know. And that's what some of those seventies acts set up, like that, that Office of Noise Abatement and Control or noise control in abatement, like it's purpose was to study that kind of stuff. That's

not what states do. So the states have, well not the states, but usually more municipalities and counties have. They have taken steps to kind of mitigate sound pollution. Like there's your noise pollution. There's usually regulations on how early or late a landscaping crew can work within the city limits, or some of them say like you can't boom your stereo or you're not allowed to have that broken glass muffler on your Harley. Um, like, there's some stuff like that.

But then like if you live kind of under a flight path, if your town wanted to say, you know what, you can't fly over our town and wake everybody up between you know, twelve at night and seven in the morning, you can't fly an airplane over it. The airplanes would just be like like, I didn't hear you. Sorry, I was listening to the Feds who say you can't make laws like that. Yeah, And you know, I get the feeling.

With municipalities. It is more like complaints from neighbors kind of noise or the lawn cruise in construction like you were saying, and less like stuff with big teeth um recently, Uh weird reason I won't get into, but I was looking up noise ordinances and Athens, Georgia, and they're kind of funny when you look at these noise ordinances. It's like it literally said, like you know, walking down the sidewalk um yelling at one another, talking about basically drunk kids,

you know, like the French quarter kind of thing. Uh. It said, you know, this includes hooting and hollering, and it was something about being able to hear you from like three feet away, but or noise from your apartment. But it's you know, it's like good luck with that.

Like you can call the cops on someone maybe, but there's no teeth or or or what do you call it when you or enforcement kind of with a lot of this stuff, aside from singling out people when it happens in the moment, and you may get a cop

come by and say turn it down. But even if there's a will to do something, it depends on if it's like rail traffic or air traffic, like the federal um, the federal government ties local local towns and counties hands like they can't do anything about it, and there's um as a result, there's a lot of noise pollution that people can't do anything about. There's a um. There's a town in Canada. I can't remember the name of it,

but it is um. It's got really like a rail system that goes through it, and it doesn't have like alarms or like the arms that come down. So trains have to hank their horns at least three times as they crossed through this town. And there's a bunch of different crossings, and they calculated that train horns blair twelve hundred times a day in this little tiny town. And like, obviously everybody's going nuts, but they can't do anything about it because the federal government of Canada is in charge

of regulating rail travel like every other developed or industrialized country. Yeah, and even if it's something like Osha and like you, you work in allowed factory and they're trying to regulate that, they say that a they don't cover all industries they should cover, and when when they do, it's very inconsistently applied.

And even when they do apply it inconsistently. Um, they say that these limits aren't even low enough to protect all the workers anyway from hearing loss said, OSHA regulations allow workers to be exposed to ninety five decibels for four hours a day, five days a week, for your entire forty year career, and that that that's like you're going to suffer from hearing loss if that's the case. Yeah, that's like holding a leafblower right right next to you for four hours a day, five days a week for

forty years. Like of course you're going to lose you're hearing. Like, that's that's crazy. Well, and then fact you're in the other health effects that no one ever talks about that we mentioned in the whole first half of this thing. And you have an unhealthy population if you're stuck in one of those places. So we can sit here and corvetch all day, which we we would love to do. But there are solutions to this, but we I want to point out one more time, all these solutions are

zero thanks to the Reagan administration. Um. Instead, there's some simple stuff you can do to help us humans, Like you can change aircraft routes, you can build barriers along roadways and railways. UM. You can even green it up, like they found that if you use shrubbery and trees mixed together so that they basically produce a fence, and you plant them close to the road or close to the railway rather than close to the place that you're trying to protect. They do pretty good at reducing the

decibels of the sound the noise pollution coming from the traffic. Um, that's some easy stuff you can do. And then on the user end, on the individuals, and there's all sorts of like acoustic insulation and paneling you can add to your house to make it a little more soundproof and quieter. Um, what about those mufflers chuck car mufflers. Yeah, so apparently the ones that make the sound or not not they're not good. Yeah, I mean that they could they could

change that. The e p A could get involved and say, you know what, you can't have those kind of mufflers anymore. Thank god if they did. As far as the shipping go, and know, it's always like a Honda Civic or something that it's like tricked out, like it's some kind of race car um. As far as the water goes in the shipping stuff like that. Those big ships, Uh, they found that if they separate the ship's engine from the hull. Uh, they are quieter, much quieter, and they even found that

there is uh. I think there's a se reduction in acoustic energy um six to eight decibels, which is significant. Uh. And they also found that it is less fuel efficient. And if they like retrofitted or kind of change the way they built these ships, I don't know if you can, well, I guess you can retrofit something. Well, yeah, the propellers are what's making them less fuel efficient, so you can easy not easily, but you can take off the old

propellers and put on new ones. Right, But it costs a lot of money up front, like they will save in the long run. And I think uh is it pronounced Marsk, the big shipping company. They spent a hundred million bucks to do just eleven of its ships, So that gives you the idea of how much it costs. Uh. There may be seen some efficiencies if they did more

or something, but it's not cheap. And they have seven forty ships they've done eleven, so well, I did see that is actually a very small fraction of all of the ships involved in shipping that are responsible for the vast majority of the noise. So if you did just

focus on the worst offenders that would have a significant impact. Yeah, there's also a huge amount of noise, apparently underwater noise that comes from offshore wind farms because of the pile driver that is moved by up and down by the blades to help produce the electricity to move the turbine right, And they found that if you just put a perforated pipe around the pile driver, the pile driver is going to produce bubbles and those bubbles will dissipate the noise.

Almost all the noise I think like of the noise coming from those offshore wind farms. That's a really simple, easy solution. Just do it people. Yeah, and there's one other thing that I hadn't thought about, but I saw a couple of places and it really makes sense, is that the noise pollution we're contributing to marine ecosystems in particular is just such low hanging fruit that there's no

reason we shouldn't do this. There's some really easy stuff we can do, like even rerouting shipping lanes is one thing we can do, and that by doing that it will actually stabilize marine ecosystems in marine life so that it will buy us a little time while we're figuring out much trickier stuff like ocean acidification and things that are also threats to it. So it's like, just removing noise pollution would really go a long way toward extending

the UM. I guess the health and vitality of the oceans while there, you know, while we're combating climate change. I love it. Let's get all these things going. Our health is suffering. Let's start with the mufflers. Yeah, that's just annoyance. Uh. Well, since Chuck said that's just annoyance, of course, everybody, that means it's time for listener mail. Uh. This one's pretty short and sweet. I just love it

when we get an answer about something. I think I might have known this at some point, but we talked about shrinking as humans. And this is from uh Steve and Roscoe, Illinois. He says, I've been a long time listener, never had a reason to reach out, but you my Arab expertise. I'm a physical therapist, and while listening to episode about crash testing, you ask why do we shrink when we get older? What happens is we age, guys, is the intervertebral discs in our back lose hydration and

as a result, we shrink. Uh. There are six discs in the cervical spine, twelve discs in the thoracic spine, and five discs in the lumbar. If each disc were to lose a minimum of one six of an inch in height, that adds up pretty quickly, and you can easily lose an inch plus in your lifetime. The other thing to consider as we age is our muscles and tissues get tighter, pulls us into positions of poor posture. That's right, and this restricts our ability to stand up straight.

You can bind all these things together and all of a sudden, Josh isn't going to hit his goal height of six ft. I have to stay on my tippy toes. New thanks for all the good work. I hope it didn't step on the toes of a future short stuff. I think we just did it. Steve. That's Steve Marima or Marima from Rusco in a way. Thanks a lot, Steve, that was a good email. We appreciate that big time. And if you haven't stumbled upon it yet, you should check out our episode Encarcopania. It is old, but it

was interesting. Yeah, if you have any ethysical therapy needs in Illinois. Give Steve a cal sounds good guy, Yeah, head to beautiful Roscoe, Illinois. Come on, if you want to be like Steve from Roscoe and uh give us some more info that we were asking for. We love that kind of stuff. You can send it to his via email to stuff Podcasts at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of I heart Radio.

For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.