Silence Stimulates

I live in a very rural area, that experiences minimal traffic noise or other urban disturbances. In fact, many friends consider it to be the far-out boonies. I need the tranquility. Over the last few decades researchers have documented many ill effects that society's noise has on people. Epidemiologists have shown a high correlation between noise and high blood pressure, heart disease, sleep loss, and immune system damage. Five years ago the UN's World Health Organization found that some 340 million Europeans (a bit more than the population of the US) annually lose over a million years of healthy life, due to noise. That's one hell of a toll!

Noise pollution has been recognized for a couple of generations as having a deleterious impact on human health and well being. As a person who built a career on studying the mechanics of noise reduction, I'm not at all surprised at the negative impact of noise on people. It's what my career was all about! It's also a major reason why I took leave of the urban life three decades ago and sought refuge and a healthier (and quieter) life in the woods of Appalachia.

I sought solace in the quiet I found out here. I avoid noisy machines—rototillers, tractors, and other small engine devices—in favor of doing as much by hand as possible. It is not only cheaper and more peaceful, but gives my body the exercise that it needs.

I have written before on this blog about my desire for tranquility and solitude. In quiet moments I seek calmness, I tune into inner thoughts, I can even come to sense the oneness of existence. I have found quiet to be soothing and healing—especially knowing that noise is unhealthy. The root of the word noise is the Latin word nausea, meaning “seasickness.” (The Latin word naus means “ship.”)

But that reasoning suggests that quiet (or silence) is primarily an escape from something. It's replacing a “thing” with “no thing.” Quiet, in this sense, is just an absence of noise; silence is just the lack of sound. Is silence really just a negative entity?

The key here is what's going on in the brain—our ultimate sensory response either to noise or quietness. The science of brain scans has exploded in recent years and is providing lots of evidence of what's going on in the brain, as it responds to various sensory inputs. Some recent research is showing that activity in the brain is stimulated by silence, just as much as when we hear sounds. A certain network of neurons lights up when sounds are heard, but quite a different set of neurons fires when quiet ensues. So the brain is just as active when quiet prevails. To the brain, silence is not a negative entity. Mental work is happening then too.

These recent findings fuel my need for quiet even more. Where silence once represented an escape from a clamorous world for me, I have come to see that it's not an escape from, but a coming to something: a state wherein my brain stays engaged—but no longer in an unpleasant way. It's now active in an agreeable and even creative way. In fact, it's doing the healthy work of silence. As Paul Simon wrote over 50 years ago,

              And the vision that was planted in my brain

             Still remains

             Within the sound of silence.

Silence: No Such Thing

We often hear people speak of and write about the experience of silence. It’s one of those words that is used rather loosely and in widely different contexts. To some people silence is a place of peace, to others it’s threatening. We have songs like “The Sound of Silence” and movies like “Silence of the Lambs.”

In no case, however, can we really experience true silence; rather, it’s varying degrees of quietude. By definition, silence is “the absence of sound,” and sound is the ear’s sensation to vibrations in the air. There is always some vibration of the air, even if it’s so small that we can’t hear it. A dog barking several miles away will still send pressure vibrations to us, but the sound level may either be below our threshold of hearing or may be masked by other nearby sources of sound.

Even in the quietest place in the world there are still vibrations in the air (and thus sound). (Now, if I were to stick my head out the window of the Space Station, I’d surely hear no sound, as there is no air. I could then say that I truly know what silence feels like, just before my head exploded.) The quietest place on the planet that we could find ourselves would be an anechoic chamber; it is a thick-walled room that acoustics scientists use to measure very quiet sound sources. It’s extremely disorienting to spend more than a couple of minutes inside one, since it seems to be absolutely silent, and we are used to constant sound, whether loud or subtle.

Even in an anechoic chamber, however (where any airborne vibration level that might exist is just too low to be heard), our ears will pick up subtle vibrations inside our body (blood pulsing, lungs expanding) and interpret them as sound. So let’s speak of degrees of quietude, rather than silence—which is in practice unattainable.

I recently read A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland, in which she described her resolute efforts to find and experience extremely quiet locations. She found that when she became immersed in (near) silence she experienced a kind of sensory depravation that created dramatic psychological and emotional shifts. She wrote that one becomes much more aware of what the mind is doing in such cases—in fact, one is forced to deal with feelings and thoughts that are normally too submerged to get in touch with. It can be scary, it can be exhilarating, it can be transforming. One can come face to face with one’s true nature in such a state of mind, after all the usual surface distractions are stripped away. In fact, this is exactly the state of mind that meditators seek.

I live in a very quiet location in the woods. I moved here partly to get away from the noise and bustle of the city. I came here to touch and enter those very quiet moments that expose me to deeper truths. The more I experience quiet, the more I value and seek it. Silence, however, is a state I’ll never get to—at least not until after I let go this material body.

Silent Spaces—Part 1

Last year I read a new book that struck a resonant chord within me. Gordon Hempton and John Grossman wrote One Square Inch of Silence in an attempt to wake people up to the fact that our auditory environment is badly polluted. Most everyone knows that cities are noisy places. Music, traffic, and most every human activity are overly loud. Our ears are assaulted by TV, by the neighbor’s yard machines, by passing traffic, and by constant airplane flights to and from nearby airports.

Hempton and Grossman focused on the incessant human-made noise in the wilderness. Hempton has scoured the country looking for really quiet locations—finding that they are virtually nonexistent. Even the most remote corners of our national parks are not free of the intrusive noise of human activity. Snowmobiles and four-wheel machines invade backcountry. Heavy airplane traffic rains down its continuous noise upon us. Even the most isolated corners get violated several times every hour with overflights. The noise of a jet at 35,000 feet can be heard scores of miles away.

In an attempt to dramatize the situation, Hempton has found a tiny patch of land—one square inch in area—that is, as far as he can tell, the most noise-free spot in the country. He’s trekked into many remote locations with sound level meter in hand and ears at alert, seeking pristine quiet locations.

Hempton’s quietest spot is a one square inch that he found in the Olympic National Park on Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula. He lives nearby and often hikes in, to savor the (near) silence in that little patch. Trying to raise awareness of the problem, he drove across country a couple of years ago in an old VW microbus—ending up in the other Washington (D.C.), to meet government officials and try to convince them to take action to lower the volume. It remains to be seen whether or not they heard him. (Is that a pun?)

When I read this book, the location from which the resonant chord resounded in my soul was created during my former career in acoustics. My focus in those days was to investigate how machines generated excessive noise and to conduct experiments to demonstrate how to quiet them. It was the heady days of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s—in wake of the Noise Control Act, which charged EPA with the mission of reducing noise pollution. (EPA was also enjoined with reducing air and water pollution.)

Studies showed that noise is far more than an intrusive, unpleasant thing. It’s a health issue—and that’s what got EPA going. Exposure to loud noise can damage the delicate hearing process. But noise is also a psychological problem. It can disorient us (and animals even more), create emotional and physical stress, and interfere with sleep.

More noise next time…