Need anything from Tesco? Like Tesco Finest Salted Pretzel or Caramelised Biscuit Chocolate Easter Eggs? £12 each with your Tesco Club Card or Tesco Finest Extra Fruity Hot Cross Buns? Two packs for just £3! Because every little helps. Selected Hot Cross Buns, majority of larger stores and online in 6th of April, Club Card or app required, exclusions apply. The worst advice I have ever gotten is stay in your lane. I am Raben Ersson, Athlete, Executive Founder and staying in my lane would have kept me small. Don't protect other people's comfort at the cost of your growth. This week on Project Swagger, my strategies for embracing your multi-hyphenate existence. Tune in now at Project Swagger, wherever you get your podcasts. Aaron Westgate used to be an optimist. When I was in graduate school, we were working on this question of how we could develop well-being interventions to actually make people's lives happier. And we had this idea that if we just put people in an empty room by themselves and just gave them a few minutes to be alone with their own thoughts, that they'd really enjoy it. You know, people always say, oh my goodness, I'm so busy, I wish I just had a few minutes to sit down and think. So Aaron recruited a whole bunch of people and she had them each spend 15 minutes in an empty room in total silence. And most people didn't enjoy it very much. They said things like brushing their teeth was better. They hated it. So she decided to flip the whole study on its head. Instead of trying to help people feel better, she was going to try and see how bad she could make them feel by giving them the option to listen to horrible sounds instead. So like someone throwing up nails on a chalkboard, glass breaking. And sure enough, yeah, people would rather listen to sounds of people vomiting, nails on a chalkboard, etc. rather than simply sit in silence. At this point, Aaron was just morbidly curious. Did people hate silence so much that they'd actually prefer pain? Like, what if she put people in an ankle cuff and gave them the option to shock themselves? It is not pleasant. It hurts a little bit. I always liken it to the feeling of like a cat sort of jumping out and scratching you. It's sort of like, ah, you know, shocking, but it's not actually harmful. And so we set this all up and we just sort of waited. And the first few participants, we just sort of like, are they going to do it? Are they actually going to shock themselves? But we saw very early on that people were indeed shocking themselves. Yeah, I know. So it's like, why would you do that? Almost half the participants gave themselves an electric shock. They couldn't even make it 15 minutes. People actually do something that's painful rather than simply sit in silence. The more you think about it, silence is a really strange thing. On the one hand, it's so uncomfortable that people would rather shock themselves than sit through it. At the same time, silence and other forms of sensory deprivation, they've been shown to reduce anxiety and PTSD. There's this one experiment I love where mice were exposed to silence and their brains actually got new neurons, like more neurons than when they were exposed to any other sounds, just from listening to silence. The End I'm Noam Hasenfeld and this is episode 3 of The Sound Barrier, a series from unexplainable about the limits of hearing and the ways we can break through. Today on the show, how can something that's nothing do so much? The Sound Barrier One of the most striking experiences of silence I've felt is when I was at a symphony and the symphony was working up to a kind of crescendo and right when it hit the crescendo, it ended. And the moment before the applause, it just kind of hit by this experience. And I definitely felt silence hit me across the face. Raja Goh is a PhD student at Johns Hopkins. He studies psychology and philosophy. That experience that he had at the symphony, it left him with some pretty basic questions. He'd figured silence was just nothing, like the absence of sound. But he'd felt it. So the question was, what was he feeling? So actually, there's a philosophical literature around this. Some people argue that there is a genuine experience of silence, right? So there's something it's like to experience silence. Whereas other people argue that silence is just the absence of experience. It sounds like one of those classic, bong-rip, dorm room questions. Like, what is silence? But Raja wanted an actual answer, which would mean he'd have to do an experiment. So at that point when I was thinking of the experiment, I was actually kind of fascinated by this illusion. Something called the one is more illusion. And you'll see in a moment why it's called the one is more illusion. Okay. Suppose I play you two sounds, right? I play you boop, boop. And then I play you a single sound. Boo. The two sounds and the single sound take up the exact same amount of time. But you will hear the single sound is longer. That's why it's called the one is more illusion. One sound seems longer than two. Yeah. And one of the great things about auditory illusions is that you can experience it for yourself. Is there a website I can go to now to check it out? Sure. Let me just send it to you. Okay. One. Two. That sounded way longer. Right, right. It's exactly the same length. That didn't even sound close. Exactly. Audio illusions like this one are great ways to learn about how our brain processes sound. They seem like glitches. But they really just show us how our brain is constantly editing the world we hear. Like when we're in a room and our voice is bouncing off all the walls and hitting our ears at slightly different times, the brain cancels out the echoes so that we only hear a single voice. When there are sounds that are muffled or distorted, the brain cancels out the echoes without us noticing. For some people with a cochlear implant, the brain can recreate almost the entire world they hear. And scientists think this particular glitch, the one is more illusion, it tells us something pretty fundamental about how our hearing works. If you look at the sound waves that enter our ears and you visualize it on the screen, it's going to be a bit of a mess. Think about what a way of hearing is. It's just a blobby thing. But the world doesn't sound like a blobby thing. We hear different individual sounds. If you're a park and you're talking to a friend and you hear a dog barking in the background, you don't hear a continuous jumble of noise, you hear discrete words. This is the big insight from the one is more illusion. Our brain is a This is the big insight from the one is more illusion. Our brain is always on the lookout for discrete sounds. It's why we're able to pull out individual sounds from a noisy background. And it's why the one boop sounds longer than the two boops. But Raja wanted to see if our brain would do the same thing to silence. My idea was to try to create a silent version of this auditory illusion. Raja replaced the boop-boop with silence-silence. His idea was that if these silences cause the same glitch, it would show that our brain is processing silences just like it processes sounds. That in a pretty literal sense, we're hearing silence. So what we did was in our experiment, our subjects had to wear headphones and we immersed our subjects in the ambient noise of a restaurant. There would be people talking, plates clinking, people walking around. And then when the trial starts, they would hear a sequence of two silences and then a one-silence sequence. And subjects had just asked which one was longer. Was the one-silence longer or was the two-silence longer? And you have an example of this too, right? Yep. I think if you play that, you should be able to hear it. So I'm in the restaurant. Yeah, that's nuts. Okay, that's... Again, that just felt... It's the same exact feeling. The single-silence feels way longer than the other two, which is basically the same thing as those notes. Yeah, yeah. So that definitely feels exactly the same thing happening. This one might be a little bit harder to hear the first time through, so I just want to play it one more time. Notice how much longer the uninterrupted silence feels compared to the two short ones, even though they're the same amount of time. Yeah. And when we ran this experiment with subjects, we actually found the exact same proportion of subjects felt that one-silence sequences are longer than the two-silence sequence. So it definitely does seem like exactly the same mechanism as I play. Wow. And did you try this illusion on yourself? Did it work for you? It definitely did work for me. When I created this illusion and played it to myself for the first time, I was like, wow, it works. Our brain isn't just editing sounds. It's editing silence. Silence is not something out there in the world, and yet we can have an experience of it. I mean, your results seem to say that we are hearing the silence. We're not just not hearing anything. Yeah, it tells us that the auditory system treats silences the same way as it treats sounds. So if silence is a real thing we can hear, what does it sound like? To find out, I decided to go to one of the quietest places on Earth. Loud noises! That's in a minute. The world moves fast. You work day, even faster, pitching products, drafting reports, analyzing data. Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI assistant for work, built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Microsoft 365 apps you use, helping you quickly write, analyze, create, and summarize. So you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your best work. Learn more at Microsoft.com. M365 Copilot. Support for Unexplainable comes from Shopify. Every worthwhile journey starts with a handful of granola and a brain full of dreams. Dreams like, what if I discover a new species? Or a new genus. Dreams like, what if I paint a masterpiece that whispers some eternal truth to everyone who sees it? Dreams of winning the big race car trophy with your big, fast race car. Or dreams of building your own thriving business. That last one is a dream Shopify can help you with. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world, and according to their data, at least 10% of all e-commerce in the United States. Start with your own design studio and choose from hundreds of ready-to-use templates to make your online store. You can use their AI tools to help you with copywriting and glamming up your product photos, and then use the platform to build a marketing campaign. You can turn those what ifs into a thriving business with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash unexplainable. Go to Shopify.com slash unexplainable. That is Shopify.com slash unexplainable. When you think about wealth inequality in America, there's probably one man whose name comes to mind. And yes, he did compare America's billionaire era to the Gilded Age. We're living in a moment where the top 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 93%, where one man, Elon Musk, owns more wealth than the bottom 53% of American households, where, while 60% of our people are living paycheck to paycheck, the billionaire class has seen its wealth increase by a trillion and a half dollars since Trump was elected. How's that? They doing pretty well? I talked to Senator Bernie Sanders about his latest bill for a wealth tax and his call for a moratorium on AI data centers. Plus, how much he uses AI himself. Today explained, every weekday and now on Saturdays too. Consider what you're about to do, Paula Trad. Sorry, man. A couple months ago, I hopped on the subway and I headed to Cooper Union, this tiny private college in Manhattan to talk with a wonderfully named expert unsound. Hello. Hi. Melody Baglione. Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Cooper Union. Can you just tell me a little bit about where we are right now? So we're in the vibration and acoustics laboratory and we also have the only anechoic chamber in New York City. An anechoic chamber is designed to be absurdly quiet. It's got double doors, it's got padding all over the walls. It's this place where you're supposed to be able to get as close to complete silence as possible. And anechoic chambers, they're pretty weird. There are all these stories about what they'll do to you if you spend too much time in there. Stories of people feeling nauseous or starting to hallucinate or this one violinist who apparently started pounding on the door immediately to get out. It's not exactly clear how much these are urban legends and how much of them are actual real events, but it isn't hard to find all kinds of people who've heard these stories and then wrote articles or made videos being like, I survived the quietest room on earth. It's a whole thing. You know, I've never done really studies to show because spend this much time here before you go crazy because I'm always so busy that I don't have time to sit there. But there are many people that are interested in that question and I'm asked that a lot, but I haven't done it myself. Can we go inside? All right. As soon as I walk into the chamber, my ears feel different. Okay, that feels really, really weird. The only word I can think of to describe the silence is thick. Like I'm waiting into jello or something. And the whole place is covered with these wedges. So you don't want to touch these wedges because they're fiberglass. They're on the walls. They're covering the door. They're on the ceiling. They're even on the floor. I'm actually standing on a catwalk suspended from the wall so we don't touch the fiberglass floor wedges. And those wedges are what make the room sound so weird. When you're in a normal room, your voice is bouncing off all the walls and the ceiling and the floor. You're hearing your voice come out of your mouth, but you're also hearing it reflected off all the other walls and then hitting your ear. That's how we're used to hearing sounds. But in an anechoic chamber, the wedges absorb so much of the sound that there aren't echoes. That's why it's called anechoic as in without echo. And it sounds really strange. Hello, I'm screaming in a room and it's really quiet. That's really weird. That's so weird. To be honest, it's hard to describe how surreal this all felt. It was almost like yelling into a black hole. Like the sound was being sucked into nothingness. The weirdness doesn't exactly translate on a mic, but here's what it sounded like outside the chamber. Woo! Woo! And here's what it sounded like inside. Woo! Hey! Hey! Ha! Ha! But the longer I stayed there, the more my ears started to adapt to the silence, just like your eyes might adapt slowly in a dark room. It's extremely, extremely quiet in here. And after a couple of minutes, I started hearing things. Every noise felt like the volume was just jacked up. My own breathing started to feel loud. I heard my own heartbeat. I feel like I can hear noises from my own head. And I can't tell if I'm making them up or not. Like there's this high pitch. There's this kind of swirling. Almost like I'm putting like a seashell up to my ear, but like reversed. Does that make any sense? Like reverse seashell. That was just 20 minutes in. As my head was swirling in the chamber, I was thinking about this story of one of my favorite composers, John Cage, who also once visited an ennecoic chamber on his own quest for complete silence. I heard in that room two sounds. One was high and one was low. And I thought there was something wrong with the room. Cage went outside and he described the sounds to the engineer, who told him that the higher sound was his nervous system and the lower sound was his circulatory system. There's no way to stop the reception of sound. If you stop the sounds from the outside, then what you hear are the sounds that are coming from the inside. And now a performance of John Cage's 433. If you've ever heard of John Cage, it's probably because of this piece, 433. Please welcome our soloist, William Marks. In one recording I found an older man walks out onto the stage wearing a tux with tails and a white bow tie. He sits down at the piano, puts on his reading glasses, and then he closes the part of the piano that covers the keys. He picks up a stopwatch and holds it up with this kind of conductor-style flourish. Presses go and just sits there. For four minutes and 33 seconds. Cage wrote 433 back in the 50s, but it still goes viral all the time. Like this particular performance has almost 10 million views on YouTube. And yeah, it might be because people think it's some kind of stunt. And the comments are kind of hilarious. Like I once didn't speak for five minutes and this guy sued me for copyright. Or I said this song is my ringtone and nobody called me. And I felt the same way when I first heard it. I was in a music class in college and my professor told us we were going to perform it in class. So we pulled up the sheet music. It's basically a whole bunch of nothing, divided into three movements of nothing. And my professor signaled us to start. For a moment, it was silent. And then I started to notice little things. Like a cough, a chair creaking when someone adjusted their position. This low murmur of voices coming from the hallway outside my own breath. And because I had the sheet music in front of me, I started hearing all these noises almost like they were intentional. I heard them interacting. I heard them layering on top of each other. I heard them getting louder and softer. And I started imagining them as if someone had composed them. Written them like notes into the sheet music. Notes that would be different wherever 433 gets performed. The first performance, you could hear the breeze in the trees. And then miraculously, when the second movement began, there were drops of rain that you could hear coming on the roof. And you know what happened in the third movement? People began talking because they realized that David Tudor wasn't going to make any sounds. So the sound of people talking was in the third movement. Cage was okay with people laughing sometimes. He had a sense of humor. But 433 wasn't a joke. And I do hope that at least some of the people behind those 10 million views on YouTube understood what Cage was doing here. He was reframing what silence is and what it can be. It doesn't matter where you are, whether you're in an anachoric chamber or outdoors on the street. There always are sounds to hear. There is no such thing as silence. This is where we finally get back to that original mystery from the Electric Shock experiment. Erin, the researcher behind the study, she says when she told people not to pay attention to anything around them and just focus on their own thoughts, they spun out pretty quickly. People's... I don't think their goal is to fill it with anxiety, but it's actually a giant stress induction. When people thought of silence as just this empty box, they filled it with their own anxieties. But silence isn't empty. Rage's experiment tells us silence is something we can hear. And Cage's piece shows us what it sounds like. It's not nothingness. It's full of noise. There's a texture, almost like the particles of air in a room that seems empty. There can be beautiful silences. There can be awkward silences. There can be really powerful silences. Like, I think often an infective speaker makes powerful uses of silence, right? When they pause, you kind of feel the weight of their words. Silence is something worth paying attention to on its own terms. Silence itself is a state of experiencing the world, you know, in the same way that what is the value in the Grand Canyon? Or what is the value in Mount Everest? Like, the value is that they're there. And so I think that when we think about things like the value of silence or the value of boredom or the value of grief, they're beautiful in their own right. And part of the wonder of being human is being able to experience them and appreciate them. And sometimes you get a clock chiming right through your eyes. Yes. This is what happens when you inherit your grandparents' grandfather clock after they die, then actually hang it up and let it do its thing. In the last couple weeks, I've started thinking about silence as turning up the volume knob on my perception. Like, right now, I'm speaking in a soundproof room. It's pretty quiet. It's pretty still. But whatever you're listening, it sounds different. You're hearing my voice, but you're also hearing the ambient sound of wherever you are. Maybe it's a light echo in your room or the idling traffic as you cross the street or the tiny buzz from a fluorescent light. So, I don't know. Maybe this is weird. But what if we just spend a little time in that silence? You're going to have your own particular kind of silence with its own particular small noises. I'm going to have mine. But, yeah, let's listen to the silence and see what we can hear. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Not right now. Okay. Okay. Okay. That was four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. And this was the third episode of our series, the Sound Barrier. We'd love to know what you thought of when you were listening to your own silence. What did it sound like? What did you hear? Or if you want to record a voice memo of silence wherever you are and email it to us at Unexplainableatvox.com, we'd love to hear it, too. On the next episode of The Sound Barrier, how a blind astronomer learned to listen to space. I thought those sounds were both or some and ugly. And at that moment, everything transformed into beauty. That's next time. As for this episode, it was reported and produced by me, Noam Hasenfeld. I also wrote the music. It was edited by Joanna Salotaroff with help from Jorge Just, mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala, fact-checking from Melissa Hirsch, and silent support from Sally Helm. Meredith Haudenot runs the show, Julia Longoria is our editorial director, and Bert Pinkerton ran towards the wooden carriage as the octopus army stampeded onto the runway. She hoisted the octopus onto her shoulders, and she turned to face the chaos. Thanks to Vartika Sharma and Paige Vickers for the beautiful artwork for The Sound Barrier series. Thanks to Robert Lew. Thanks as always to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show, along with me and Bert. And if any of you out there have thoughts about the show, send us an email. We're at unexplainable at vox.com. You can also leave us a review or a rating wherever you listen. Really helps us out. And if you're really into supporting the show and all of Vox in general, join our membership program. You can go to vox.com slash members to sign up. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back with the final episode of The Sound Barrier on Wednesday.
