Category: silence

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Silence & the brain

A Nautilus Magazine article on the neuroscience of silence titled “This is Your Brain on Silence.” A popularized review of the scientific research that demonstrates, surprisingly to many, that the brain is actively and positively stimulated by silence as much as by sound. The brain deteriorates as excessive sound or noise assaults the body via blood pressure increases and cellular changes. Further, silence promotes a higher sense of alertness and consciousness. Investigators mentioned ranged from neuroscientists and cardiologists to musicians naturally interested in the neurological role of silence in musical compositions, and tourism marketers seeking to promote Finland’s abundance of silence. From the article:

Noora Vikman, an ethnomusicologist … lives in the eastern part of Finland, an area blanketed with quiet lakes and forests. In a remote and quiet place, Vikman says, she discovers thoughts and feelings that aren’t audible in her busy daily life. “If you want to know yourself you have to be with yourself, and discuss with yourself, be able to talk with yourself.”

URL: http://nautil.us/issue/16/nothingness/this-is-your-brain-on-silence; summary:
http://www.designntrend.com/articles/18934/20140905/noise-silence-neuroscience.htm

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Psychology Today: Silence

Psychology Today offers a collection of 21 popular essays on the topic of silence: “The Sounds of Silence.” As with popular treatments of complex and nuanced topics, your mileage may vary:

  • A Taxonomy of Silence: What can we learn from silences? by Judith Eve Lipton, M.D.
  • The Art of Silence: How the use of silence can make you powerful and charismatic, by Alex Lickerman, M.D.
  • Why We Need Quiet: We need silence for all our senses, by George Michelsen Foy
  • Does Music Help Memory? Students listen to music while studying. Is that a good idea? by William R. Klemm, D.V.M, Ph.D.

17 more essays …

URL: http://www.psychologytoday.com/collections/201312/the-sounds-silence

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NYT: Is silence going extinct?

The article writer joins a scientist in Alaska’s Denali National Park in search of silence and natural sound, with commentary on the status of silence and natural sound as components of wilderness and animal life. Remarks the scientist: “If you’re on foot and you choose to focus on the natural quality of the landscape, you’re completely immersed in nature; nothing else exists. Then a jet will go over, and it kind of breaks that flow of consciousness, that ecstatic moment.” Part of that natural quality and flow of consciousness is silence.

For more than 40 years, scientists have used radio telescopes to probe starry regions trillions of miles away for sounds of alien life. But only in the past five years or so have they been able to reliably record months-long stretches of audio in the wildernesses of Earth. … Indeed, though soundscape ecology has hardly begun, natural soundscapes already face a crisis. Humans have irrevocably altered the acoustics of the entire globe — and our racket continues to spread.

Article includes representative natural sounds of Denali National Park.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/magazine/is-silence-going-extinct.html

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Iyer on quiet

In a New York Times article titled “The Joy of Quiet” writer Pico Iyer reflects on solitude and alone-time in contemporary U.S. society. Here is a representative quote:

The urgency of slowing down — to find the time and space to think — is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/opinion/sunday/the-joy-of-quiet.html

Brought to out attention by a friend of Hermitary.

On the Hermitary website is Iyer’s essay “The Eloquent Sounds of Silence” published in Time magazine in 1993. Iyer has long had an interest in this topic.