This is one of my paintings, from a series of paintings I’d done one summer while in college. A dear friend of mine to whom I’d given this painting, happened to mention it in a conversation recently while we were reminiscing about something-else, going down the memory-lane.
Reflecting on this image and what prompted me to paint it years back, a different thought resonated with me now, on the subject of the painting – on the topic of Silence, or the increasingly rare presence of it in our noise-polluted modern life. We’ve all encountered noise-ridden situations where we find it hard to hear ourselves think.
Noise-Pollution is now regarded as a public health crisis. Putting it in further perspective, decibel levels (loudness) of emergency vehicles are considered a measure of how loud our world, our societies have become today. Sirens from emergency vehicles have to be louder to be heard from the ambient noise in the neighborhood/landscape.
From an article in TIME magazine titled, How Listening to Silence Changes Our Brains, “Today’s sirens are an estimated six times louder than they were a century ago, indicating that our population centers are vastly louder, too.” “According to the National Park Service’s Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division, noise pollution doubles or triples every three decades”
We’ve all turned to that quite spot to take an important call, or in situations that call for decision making. What is it about higher decibel noise that we walk away from when possible, in these scenarios?
Is noise just a loud, inconvenient nuisance? Turns out the continuous and loud noise in modern societies, are known to cause irreversible damage to our bodies and our cognitive function.
So that brings us to the question – what happens to our cognitive abilities when we experience silence, or when there’s lack of noise?
A 1970s study – The Effect of Elevated Train Noise On Reading Ability showed that reading test scores of middle school students in Manhattan classrooms facing an elevated subway track with louder noise levels lagged compared to students in quieter classrooms. Among other stressors noise caused, the study found that students’ concentration was interrupted by the spike in noise levels, leading to lower cognition, memory and ability to grasp and learn in class.
In his TED talk, “Why noise is bad for your health and what you can do about it” Prof. Mathias Basner, an expert in this field, discusses the effects of noise on sleep, health and cognitive functions. Few staggering salient points he mentions in this talk are – “In 2011, the World Health Organization estimated that 1.6 million healthy life years are lost every year due to exposure to environmental noise in the Western European member states alone”. Increased risks for cardiovascular disease, when subjected to prolonged noise exposure, causing stress, which in turn leads to secretion of stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol into our blood stream and studies have shown blood vessels to become stiffer after a single night of noise exposure”.
In another seminal study from Duke University, titled “Is silence Golden?” Imke Kirste and her team studied the effect of five stimuli – four types of sounds and the fifth, silence, on mice inside soundless chambers, and measured cell growth in the mouse’s hippocampus region of the brain, the region of the brain associated with learning and memory. This study found that the most response to the stimuli on cell growth in the hippocampus was when the mice were exposed to silence. Exposure to silence has shown positive physiological changes in the cell growth in the brain, which is not only phenomenal, but actionable.
In their book, “One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s quest to Preserve Quite” acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton and John Grossmann alerts us to shrinking resource that is natural silence and call for action to preserve the last silent refuges in America.
Another noteworthy work is the book “The Great Animal Orchestra” naturalist and musician Bernie Krause has demonstrated how human made noise can disrupt soundscapes and patterns in the natural world. These and many such studies point to the positive effects of “Silence” on human well being.
Let’s look at Noise from a technology perspective. As a physicist, discerning signals from a background of noise in experiments and data analysis, striving for a higher signal/noise ratio, by designing hardware to reduce noise, and in data analysis, to isolate noise from signal, has been at the core of fundamental research I’ve been at the helm of for several years and continues currently in my R&D role in the semiconductor microchip industry. To me, and many scientists in the domain, study of noise and its mitigation, has been integral to our research and in technology development.
Noise, reduction and cancellation: Noise and its reduction is a big focus in designing electronic circuits that are core to the microchips, sensors and myriad devices that are integral to our lives today. Acoustic and digital noise reduction products, both via hardware and software development, is a multi-billion dollar industry.
In science and engineering “Noise” and its mitigation is a major field of study. In addition to improvements made in engineering design in many products to reduce noise, there are also materials engineering to fabricate new materials capable of better sound absorption and noise isolation. In information processing, noise plays a detrimental effect by causing undesired modifications to the original signal, which can distort the information being transmitted. In Quantum computing, “Noise” plays a major challenge that can cause errors in quantum computations. Machine learning and AI, also deal with Noise and their mitigation, which now seems ubiquitous that we strive on the technical domain to reduce noise across the board, in our products.
Circling back to the fact that ambient noise levels in our environments are increasing rapidly and detrimentally affecting human health and well-being, could exposure to Silence, be the much needed antidote to regaining our health, enhancing creativity and fruitful productivity in a noisy world ? A thought to ponder…in Silence !!