The human brain in a soundproof room goes crazy

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

If at night you want to kill your neighbors that interfere with your sleep - believe me, the silent world is much worse. This is the conclusion reached by Danish journalist Catherine Croyby. She locked herself in a soundproof room and was able to hold out in it for about an hour. According to the girl, complete silence acts on the brain like a drug.

Is silence really golden? I live in a metropolis and cannot imagine what it would be like to fall asleep without the noise of cars or the crying of a neighbor's child. I have acquaintances who have moved to the countryside. They go to bed in near absolute silence, but I don't think I could do that.

Minnesota has Orfield's soundproof (anechoic) laboratory, which has set the Guinness World Record as "the quietest place on Earth." Sound equipment manufacturers use it for process testing. Ordinary visitors can also come to the silent room. The founder of the laboratory, Steve Orfield, says that the maximum amount of time a person could spend in this room is 45 minutes. According to him, some visitors start hallucinations after a few seconds. I decided to test for myself the effect of absolute silence - how unbearable is this feeling?

I found an anechoic chamber at a Danish Technical University north of Copenhagen. Unlike the American laboratory, ordinary people are not allowed here. But for me, as a journalist, they made an exception. When I arrived at the university, assistant engineer Jorgen Rasmussen led me into a brightly lit room. He watched me during the experiment. Going inside, I was shocked by the feeling of total emptiness - there was just deathly, in the truest sense of the word, silence. It felt like I had thick earplugs in my ears. When I clapped my hands, the sound immediately disappeared. When I tried to say something, the upholstery on the walls, ceiling and under the floor seemed to suck the words out of my mouth.

This soft padding was made of fluffy horizontal and vertical barbs that suppressed the reflection of any sound wave. I've never seen this. The soft floor added a feeling of complete disorientation - thanks to it, I felt that I was floating, not leaning on anything.

At 13:00 Jorgen closed the heavy upholstered door and I started the stopwatch on my phone. Before closing the door, he reminded me to call if I felt uncomfortable or needed help getting out. Why the call? No one can hear my screams. This information plunged me into panic even more.

It took only a few seconds before I started to worry a little about the possibility of going insane. To overcome this fear, I tried to relax myself and enjoy the silence - I pretended that I was an astronaut in outer space who needed to complete a serious mission. However, after I tried to take a few steps "on the surface of the moon", I was distracted by a barely audible sound, similar to a fire alarm. But I knew I couldn't hear him.

A minute later, my brain began to work against me. After a few seconds, the alarm ceased, and I began to hear my pulse ticking. Then I tried to talk to myself - this was the only way to stay sane. I began to describe my clothes aloud, but that didn't ease my anxiety one iota.

My neck was the next part of my body to make unexpected sounds. Every time I turned my head, I heard something like the crunch of chips in a bag. I moved to the middle of the room to lie down on the floor and shift my focus to other sensations - perhaps the worst of ideas.

On the floor, it seemed to me that I was smoking and levitating somewhere in a huge fluorescent container. Only at that moment did I glance at my stopwatch. It took only 6 minutes. I thought that if I made my body not make all these sounds, then I would be able to accept it better.

My next step to curb the silence was buzzing and humming in time to the rhythm and sounds of my body. If the first sign of insanity is talking to yourself, then the second is beatboxing to the rhythm of your heartbeat. For the next 20 minutes, I thought I'd last longer if I fell asleep. I called Jorgen and asked him to turn off the light. Another really bad idea. Without light and in general any visual clues, I completely lost my orientation in space and felt that I was floating somewhere into nothingness. I kept waiting for my eyes to get used to the darkness, but it never happened.

I can honestly say it was pretty creepy to see nothing and hear nothing. I stayed inside for a while. When the stopwatch hand crossed the 40-minute mark, I tried to scream just to make sure someone could hear me, but it wasn't meant to be.

After a few minutes, my head began to spin and I reached for the phone. My hands were so sweaty that the fingerprint sensor could not recognize them, so I was unable to unlock my smartphone. I started to panic and dialed the wrong PIN three times before unlocking my smartphone. Then, to the joy of finally gaining access to the device, I almost dropped it from my hands.

And that was all - the fear that I practically lost the only opportunity to get out of this dark, soundless space void was the best motivation for completing the experiment. I called Jorgen and asked to be released. When they turned on the light and he came in to save me, I felt a little stupid - after all, before starting the experiment, I hoped that I would hold out for almost a few hours, and I would leave only when I won the victory over Silence itself. But this did not happen either.

When I finally left the room, it seemed to me that I went to a rave party - my ears were torn from sounds and background noise, which in everyday life we do not even notice. In the end, I managed to stay in the room for 48 minutes. I like to think that if I hadn't turned off the lights, I could have held out longer. But in the end, the silence turned out to be too loud for me.