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Man Spends 4 Hours in the World’s Quietest Room
It causes him to hallucinate random flashes of light and a ghost
I like quiet places. But there is a big difference between enjoying being in a peaceful woodland to being in a completely silent room. I do like there to be some sounds around, even if they are quiet.
There’s one of these silent rooms in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It’s what’s called an anechoic chamber. According to this article from 2012, the longest anybody had been able to spend in there was 45 minutes.
It turns out that the mind struggles to cope with complete silence.
Usually, we get subtle cues from the sounds around us. But, without any sounds at all, we struggle to make sense of where we are. We can even end up hallucinating.
This article from the Guardian points out just how important subtle sounds from our environment are:
“The presence of sound means things are working; it’s business as usual — when sound is absent, that signals malfunction. On 9/11, despite being out of mobile phone reception, a huge number of hikers abandoned their walks. They hadn’t heard about the terrorist attacks; they were just spooked by the lack of aeroplane noise and sensed something was wrong.”
