By Ari Lauer-Frey
As Jane Brox affirms in her article for The New Yorker, titled “A Social – and Personal – History of Silence,” silence has always been a goal of human life: “However fearful silence may be, people have always searched for it. During the third century, in a time far quieter than our own, the Desert Mothers and Fathers preached silence; in the sixth century, Benedict of Nursia included it in his Rule for monastics.” The silence of a sixth-century monastery is far and few between today, as our modern age presents the most challenges to silence of any time in human history. As our era of noise continues its acceleration, it seems important to remind ourselves how crucial silence is to properly functioning human life, both in regard to tangible, sonic silence and the more subtle moments of mental quietude that are becoming increasingly rare in our daily lives.
The noisiness of our social environments has been on a consistent rise, with noise pollution (generally defined as exposure to harmful and straining noise levels) identified by the European Environmental Agency as the second largest environmental concern for public health. It can be difficult to fully grasp the significance of an increase in noise, as we may even (technically) sleep through environmental noise that is detrimental to us. This pernicious quality has led to a world in which noise and, particularly transportation-produced noise, create environments that are stressful. Noise is not simply annoying; it poses danger. A study published by the Journal of Cardiology found that chronic exposure to unhealthy levels of sound – which the WHO (World Health Organization) has identified as continuous noise at and above 55 decibels (dBA) – “triggers a chronic stress reaction that increases vascular inflammation,” increasing exposed individuals likelihood of developing a variety of cardiovascular diseases (CVD).
This decline of silence is not only occurring on a systemic level, though. We are also experiencing a culture of noisiness. Globally increasing music consumption provides one indicator of this propulsion towards noise. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry’s annual global report recording an average weekly listening time increase from 18.4 hours in 2021 to 20.1 hours in 2022 and another increase to 20.7 hours in 2023. Furthermore, our habits of listening represent another source of noise-caused unhealthiness. According to the WHO, nearly 50% of persons aged 12-35 years could be exposed to unsafe levels of sound from the use of personal audio devices. Perhaps some of this increase in personal noise can be speculated as a response to the sonic abrasiveness of one’s environment: at least music from our personal devices and through our headphones is noise of our choosing, rather than the sounds of constant air traffic, ground traffic, and construction work that increasingly characterize our lived spaces. But it is still noise.
Our increase in music listening – and some of its causes – highlights another way in which our modern world has diminished our capability to find and maintain silence: the always-there, always-tempting presence of the mobile phone. Our utter reliance on our phones and social media has been proven by research, including studies done by the Department of Psychological Science at the University of Bergen, which found that restriction of smartphone use caused “psychological withdrawal symptoms similar to those found in other behavioural addictions.” Moreover, smartphone use over time can have degenerative effects on attention span. Gloria Mark, a Professor at University of California, Irvine, and author of “Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness, and Productivity” found that average attention spans on a screen fell from 150 seconds in 2004 to 75 seconds in 2012 and then all the way down to 47 seconds in 2023. Through digital content, exemplified in short, TikTok-style formats, our ability for focused attention is rapidly diminishing. This skill is being replaced with more time spent on activities across the internet that are very engaging but rarely challenging (known as rote activities). This new focus on mentally lighter activities has been making quick work of our attention spans. And when our attention spans shorten, our rate of activity switching increases, which has proven to be an inherently stressful process, leading to high blood pressure and, eventually, the same health risks as traditional noise. How can we expect to sit in silence if we can’t even sit through a movie or a ten-minute YouTube video?
In an effort to find ways to challenge our era of noise, I have tried to find ways of being quiet, even if only for a moment. Over several weeks, I participated in a variety of “silent” activities and environments – both the mental silence of tactics such as meditation, as well as physically quiet spaces, such as the designed silence of an anechoic chamber. Though many of my attempts were imperfect and even unsustainable, my hope is that they may provide others with new ideas for cultivating silence, as well as help us think more seriously about the role that silence can (and perhaps should) play in our lives. If you are interested in hearing about these experiences, please read the second half of this article via the digital copy at https://trail.pugetsound.edu/.
Dopamine Detox
“The modern wellness industry has become so lucrative that people are creating snappy titles for age-old concepts,” said Dr. Peter Grinspoon in his article on dopamine detoxes for Harvard Medical School. The dopamine detox was originally developed by psychiatrist Dr. Cameron Sepah and advertised in his 2019 piece “The Definitive Guide to Dopamine Fasting 2.0: The Hot Silicon Valley Trend” as a means of replacing negative habits like excessive substance use, gambling, and phone use with positive habits such as exercising, socializing and meditating. It has been a largely misunderstood and poorly appropriated practice in recent years. The detox’s academic roots and simple recommendations for increased mindfulness have been largely ignored and cheapened by the many wellness gurus and influencers who have adopted the dopamine detox; evidently, they have decided to latch onto the term rather than the definition.
In figuring out how to implement my own detox, I came across more than a few people advising me to lock myself in my house, speak to no one, and abstain from food. I settled for a far milder form of abstinence – one that would target one of the main sources of noise: technology. For first timers, I would suggest a similar approach, which involved simply locking my phone away for 24 hours. At first, I felt the withdrawal, desperately filling my time with chores and minute tasks to busy myself. Even such simple things as sitting down for lunch were accompanied by a new sense of anxiety; without my phone, now I had to listen to the incessant humming of my fridge instead of whatever was in my headphones.
Without my phone, without noise, I was forced into a new rawness with the everythingness around me. It seemed the existential equivalent of poking at an exposed nerve ending. Finding nothing to busy myself with and needing something to occupy the silence, I decided to do something I so rarely do: go on a walk. And in limiting my personal, technological noise, I was able to be with the noise around me in new ways. I heard the calls of birds differently and found myself attentive to the sigh of the breeze passing by me. In silencing myself, a newfound awareness and appreciation for other kinds of noise was allowed to come forward.
Meditation:
“Starting at the top of the head, gently scan through the body,” says Andy, my virtual meditation guide provided by the popular meditation app Headspace. Paradoxically, and like that of many others, my practice of silence is intimately tied to my #1 noisemaker. A 2023 global report by the Business Research Company estimated the Meditation market to have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of approximately 21%, reaching a market size of $14.6 billion by 2027. Meditation apps are leading the charge, Headspace having estimated earnings of $195 million in 2023 and their main competitor, Calm, earning an estimated $300 million. Factored into the Business Research Company estimation were reports from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that indicated increasing rates of stress and anxiety in daily life. Unsurprisingly, the business of disorder is quite lucrative. While meditation apps are an imperfect solution, meditation in general has been shown to decrease stress, increase attention spans, and lower blood pressure (along with many other benefits), and so I would say they are a net positive. And perhaps, though they are connected to our phones, they offer us a way to redirect how we use our devices and what services we spend our time on.
However, if you are looking for a more grounded approach, a weekly guided meditation in the Kilworth Chapel may be the answer. Led by the Tacoma Buddhist Center from 7-9pm on Wednesdays, the meditation allows participants to experience communal silence with intentionality thanks to its Buddhist approach. On the night I attended, the focus of both the meditation and the following teaching was “perfect emotion,” one element of Buddhism’s noble eightfold path. Between stretches of silence, Manidha, a member of the Triratna Buddhist Order who led the session, asked the group to send love in the direction of four different people of our choosing. First, we would send love to ourselves; next, to a loved one; then, to a person whom we viewed with complete neutrality; and finally, to someone we had active disdain for. “Silence helps us to see our habits, patterns, and reactivity, ultimately freeing us from these fetters,” Manidha would later tell me. Regardless of one’s religious affiliation, an experience such as this can serve as an opposition to the loneliness that a noisy world promotes, as well as a reminder that community has been integral to many practices of silence throughout history.
Sensory deprivation tank
The float tank (also known as a sensory deprivation tank) was first introduced in the 1950s by physician and neuroscientist John Lilly – the most famous result of his work for the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Officers Corps. The aim of the tanks was to separate the individual from external stimuli as much as possible. Lilly himself had noted the brainwashing potential of such sensory-depriving technology, a possibility of particular interest to branches of the U.S. military during the Cold War era. However, Lilly left this position in the 60s, becoming a semi-icon of the countercultural movement, claiming that float tanks had the capacity for great self-discovery and empowerment. The results, Lilly asserted, were dependent on the controls, on whether or not one’s participation in the tank was of personal choice; both free-willed and forced participation could result in mind control, it was simply a matter of who was controlling whose mind.
As I entered my pod at the Urban Float facilities in University Place – having just been left to my devices by a zealous employee hoping to convince me to buy a $200 monthly membership – I remained unsure where this experience lay on the spectrum of brainwashing. As advertised on their website, the tank of body temperature water and 1,200 lbs of Epsom salt will lead you to “stop noticing where your body ends and the water begins.” While I found an hour in the salty tub to be quite relaxing and very quiet, I questioned whether I couldn’t experience similar relief by staying home and having a free, warm bath in my tub. There were, of course, elements of the floating, close-lid pod that differed from any old tub. Touching nothing but the water below me and the air above me, everything left the foreground, and I was met with truly empty physical and mental space. Time only passed because it must. After some unidentifiable amount of time, a moment of slight bodily awareness returned, and I decided to crack my knuckles. The sound felt so far away, and so did the sensation. But then the pod was beeping, letting me know that my time was up and bringing me back to the reality of having spent $99 to lie in a tub for an hour. In my experience, today’s use of the float tank – as well as the other offerings of Urban Float, including halotherapy, chromotherapy, and wellness pods – seems representative of the modern wellness industry at large, offering minimally proven but exciting solutions to those who have the time and money to be frivolous with their health journeys.
Anechoic Chambers
Similar to the development of sensory deprivation tanks, many of the first anechoic chambers were produced for military interests, such as “Beranek’s Box,” designed during World War II by Dr. Leo Beranek at Harvard University. Precisely designed with sound-absorbing material that significantly minimizes sound reflections within the room, “Beranek’s Box” was used to test various communication and noise control devices for wartime uses. Since then, anechoic chambers have become ideal places to do various kinds of acoustic research and development, such as the chamber I had the privilege to visit at Central Washington University, the only room of its kind in an academic institution in Washington.
I had been brought here by my friend Logan, a physics major who had used the room a previous summer to research the sonic qualities of drums. Our guide was CWU physics professor Dr. Andy Piascek, accompanied by Ryan, a psychology graduate student with a fascination for sensory deprivation. Dr. Piascek explained to us that the room, beyond some piping and electrical wiring, was completely separate from the science building that it sat within – a metal cube of isolation. The foam of the walls worked to eliminate any reflections of sound. The effect was tangible, our voices dropping off in front of us as we spoke to each other. “It’s like a recording studio on steroids,” said Dr. Piascek.
Eventually, us three students worked up the courage to sit in the room closed and without any lights on; absolute silence. Dr. Piascek left us to explore, directing our attention to the three spongey mats on the ground. We found our positions quietly and began half an hour of uninterrupted silence. I sat, ready for the absence of stimuli to swallow me whole, waiting for my mind to implode. To my surprise, there was little to say of the experience beyond a notable feeling of utter peacefulness. After what felt like only a few minutes, my phone’s alarm began to chirp, signaling that we had succeeded in our mission. We casually stood up, stretched, and departed from one of the quietest places in the world. While it may not have felt very dramatic, maybe that’s the point: in embracing the absolute silence, I was able to experience a peaceful emptiness of thought and stress quite incomparable with the rest of my life. And while I must regretfully inform you that it may be difficult (or expensive) to make your own visit to such a noiseless room, I believe that it is a mostly replicable experience we all can have. This is because intentionality is everything; my willingness to sit in that room and embrace its silence can be transferred to any relatively quiet room, and so be the start of a practice of appreciating silence, of finding a way out of the noise.
In completing all of these activities, I can not say they I was wholly changed, ready to go join a silent convent in the woods. There is still a part of me desiring to blare abrasive music in my ears during those walks that could be silent. There is still a part of me that feels both obligated and wanting to participate in a noisy world of cars and Instagram and modern enjoyments. But I have also become more aware that there is another side to me – one that wants to hear the birds chirp and one that can sit with his thoughts and feelings without distraction. And in a world that increasingly favors our proclivity for noise over our capability for silence, I would encourage us all to work through the discomfort and see what happens when we embrace the quiet moments life has to offer.