Support for this show comes from the Working Forests initiative. The working forest industry is committed to planting more trees than they harvest. More than 1 billion seedlings are planted in US working forests every year. From biologists to GIS analysts, hiring managers, accountants, working forest professionals have dedicated their focus towards sustainability, using their expertise to help ensure a healthy future for America's forests. They say they don't just plan for the future. They plant it. You can learn more at workingforestsinitiative.com. I just finished the third installment of your Sound Barrier series, which my cat and are doing. It is the day before Thanksgiving. I was cooking some cornbread while you guys had that section of silence. I heard the sounds of cracking eggs and the mixer going, I heard the brush of my finger against my cheek, and I heard the electronic noise of the inside of my headphones. It was interesting to me when no-hats experience silence together. When I'm doing malicious, suddenly there is nothing. I realized there is no silence. There is the water that is running until I shut it off. Then I could hear my fridge and my cat in the other room demanding my attention. As I sat there for the four minutes and 33 seconds, my fridge stopped making noise, which was more interesting to me than it has ever been before. I got goosebumps afterwards, and it just felt really powerful to think about all these people sitting in silence together and what are all of us doing and how wonderful that was. The four minutes and 33 seconds of silence coincided with the exact moment I began to do my makeup this morning. The pencil going into the sharpener, filing layers away. I heard every stroke of my eyebrow pencil as I swiped my brows to fill them in. During my four minutes and 33 seconds of silence, I was able to hear the quiet pattern of spring rain coming down on the roof and water dripping down the side of the house. The scratch of placing the cat back onto the pencil when I was finished. The ticking of the war clock, the buzzing of the fridge. The pop of my mascara wand going in and out of the tube. The trains passing nearby, as well as the water pipes piping water to the kitchen. The twisting of my highlighter cap, opening and closing. The wheel rolling in the track of my bathroom drawer. I heard my stomach processing the pizza I'd eaten about an hour earlier. Finally, the smack of my lips after an application of gloss. The sounds are always with you, which usually fade into the background. The soundtrack to your very own life. Very interesting and almost tactile experience for someone typically irked by the repetitive noises of life. This is Alex in Atlanta, Georgia. Hello from Daniel, in suburban Melbourne, in Australia. I'm in Toronto, it is dark and early and there is a sliver of orange rising above the city. My partner is in bed, my dog is on the balcony. And this is the sound of my morning. But listening to the silence, I discovered that the sound of peeling yams is actually distinctly different from peeling parsnips. Peeling parsnips was somehow a softer sound, almost comforting. My name is Robin Moore. I'm going to record the silence here in my kitchen. I'm going to record the silence here in my kitchen. This is Dan Shepherd, in Sandeens, California. Most excellent. I still live. We had just gotten a lot of rain and mosquitoes are back out again. You will hear me slapping my leg to try to keep the mosquitoes away. This time of year, though, Rufus, I mean Bird and the Anasammingbird, they like to argue in fights. You can hear a little of them in the background. I heard goldfinches, you have a couple of kinds of goldfinches, the American goldfinch and the lesser goldfinch, mostly the lesser goldfinches. You might be able to hear the doves into my next door neighbor. Apparently she was a former petitions assistant and she keeps doves in her back garden and you can hear those occasions. Today is November 11th. Here in Canada we do Remembrance Day on November 11th. I participated every year. You go to the Semitath of the corner here in town and watch folks lay a reat and at one point they do a moment of silence. My dad was in the Navy so I like to go over here. It's just interesting every other year. The moment of silence has been what I thought was longer than needed. But I think I will think of that differently today. I am in downtown Rochester. I tucked away behind a wall to not catch the wind. It can be very strangely peaceful and still feel kind of natural when you're in the middle of a city. It's wild sometimes. It was hard not to feel that silence with my own thoughts. It was really amazed by the reaction people had to the room of silence where it seemed super uncomfortable for people to be immersed in absolute complete silence. And that's because for me I take my hearing aids out and I'm in absolute complete silence. I don't hear my heartbeat. I don't hear my breathing. I don't hear anything. And that for me is quite comforting actually. It's my place of being sort of home. You know, like that home base feel of, ah, yeah, now I'm good. I do that every night. I take my hearing aids out. I'm in complete and utter silence. And then I wake up in the morning. Totally silent. Until I put my hearing aids in and then all of a sudden, I am tuned in. I'm a wake and alive with the world that's going on around me. It's things are moving in check and you can hear just the gentle hum in the room. You can hear yourself walking across the room. You hear everything. It's like suddenly turning a switch and being kind of more awake. I just thought it was fascinating that people are in general uncomfortable with silence. And thought, well, I'm not. And I wonder how other very heart of hearing people feel and how the deaf community feels about silence. It must be totally different than the hearing book. One of the things that you won't hear when you're listening to it is the den of the tenetists that is in my ears. It's constantly going and giving us a speech. It's this high drone. It's like a high G. And so sometimes when I'm trying to listen to something quiet, it takes a lot of effort. But I always like to take a moment in you ways when there is some quiet time and try to be there focused on that sound to tune it out or to listen to the world around me. Kade, Gordon Taylor from Mullen, Mimbi, Australia. I'd just hit off the third T.M. I was walking down towards my ball with my headphones on when I started the silence. I think it was when I heard him cough in the studio that I realized what I was hearing was just so beautiful and unique to me. The early cicadas spring, the bird life, the wind noise, the red out of my clubs. And the whole time I thought it was someplace quiet. Anyway, I think I'm going to go take a walk in the woods later and listen to the silence in the woods. I'm going to go to the woods later and listen to the silence in the woods. I'm Dan Pauley and I'm at Massineer Infirmary where I'm the Director of the Lourd Tennis Research Center and Professor Harvard Medical School. I might have to do this often because of where you are right now, but I'm just going to do that again in one second after the siren is gone. After the siren, yeah, which just confirms I work at a hospital. Exactly. I don't know if this is an ambulance or something. Well, I just want time and then I don't know if I need to keep doing it. But yeah, one more time if you can just say your name and the best way to introduce you. I'm Dan Pauley. I'm the Director of the Lourd Tennis Research Center at Massineer and Professor at Harvard Medical School. Last time we talked was for the Tennis episode in the Sound Barrier series. We just got tons of questions from listeners that I'd love to run by you in a sec. But before I get there, I want to ask you a question I had that came up while I was doing this episode. Basically, you have Tennis, right? You told me you got it after you became a researcher. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. So the other researcher I talked to Stefan, he also got it after becoming a researcher. And the psychologist I know listened to the episode and told me he got it after working with Tennis Patients for years. And I was even obsessing about Tennis so much while making this episode that I kind of thought I started hearing things. And I guess I'm wondering, do you think there's anything going on here that's more than just irony? That there might be some kind of connection between focusing on Tennis a lot and getting it? Okay, so let me play the skeptic. As researchers, you don't really ever get to choose what you're going to do research on until you're a little bit older. And number one risk factor for Tennis is age. So I think there's a, okay, all right, so like a little bit of a coincidence there. But I started doing research after the Boston Marathon bombings. You know, there were a hundred people standing near those blasts that developed it afterwards. You know, I just kind of felt a calling because of wanting to feel useful to something that was like big and eventful. And the city I lived in and the people I worked with. And then I, you know, I was able to relate to it personally because I went to this wedding of a Scottish postdoc in my lab and the bagpipers and the sound of the music that basically was like the start of the Brickley Camels bagpipes. I started to break the Camels back. I guess after that event, the tentenitus that came from being around loud sounds that normally clears up, didn't and it's still with me. But the brain is always perched right on the razor's edge of being able to produce tentenitus. If you look at the activity of the brain in silence of some new tentenitus, it's very active. It's not like the brain is quay essence when there isn't a sound. It's just that that activity that's ongoing isn't being read out by your consciousness as a sound. So really what distinguishes all this sort of blinking lights of neurons firing from being read out as a percept versus not. What is the line between a hallucination and just the ongoing sort of noise of this massive machine at work? This is the key question of why is there tentenitus? It isn't like a switch that goes on or off. It's probably very subtle. What distinguishes activity in the brain during silence that is just not perceived as anything versus the activity that is perceived at this never ending sound. That's not just a philosophical question. That's like what gives me confidence that we can defeat tentenitus because it's not like you have to take this aberishness and take this aberishness in the brain and turn it back to nothing. You just have to disorganize it enough to go back to what it was before you didn't have tentenitus. Which is still plenty of activity in the presence of silence just isn't being read out consciously as a sound. All right, let's get to some of the questions we got from listeners on tentenitus and silence. The first one I wanted to get into was a question about mesophonia. Can you tell me a bit about mesophonia? Like what it is? How it works? Sure. Mesophonia is a condition where certain sounds elicit a very powerful, very negative emotional reaction. Irritation does not do it justice. It's closer to almost anger or rage. It's extremely unpleasant. So chewing, burping, coughing, sometimes tapping on the keyboard or clicking a computer mouse will be triggered. So these are often sounds that when they're experienced by someone on the other end, they're like, eh! Extremely irritating. I don't know. I've felt like I've had something like mesophonia for a long time. I remember as a child when I would hear certain types of mechanical noise, like a fridge or an AC unit. It's hard to describe. It sometimes sound like it was angry. And I would kind of freak out as a kid. Is that sort of what mesophonia is? This sort of like profound fear discomfort response to sounds? I'm a neuroscientist. So, way I look at it, of all the senses, the auditory system has a really strong interconnectedness with the limbic system. So limbic system, you know, regulates mood and emotion. It also is surveilling the environment for threats. So imagine all of these bridges between the hearing parts of the brain and the limbic parts of the brain. If the weights are changed slightly on them, they can quickly take on an emotional significance. It seems on a way almost like arbitrary. Like why does this need to the sound of a refrigerator sort of elicit this sort of emotional reaction? But the hearing system is the watchman of our bodies, right? It is doing 24 hour surveillance. And so, of course, it sort of has a privileged connection with the parts of our brain that are assessing threats. Because that's what we depend on the auditory system for. Threats that are other senses might not catch threats. We might encounter all we're sleeping. So it's a good thing that the auditory system is so heavily interconnected with brain systems that evaluate threats, but it's also a vulnerability. That just makes me think of what you said last time about how people with tinnitus have a whole brain problem. That it's not necessarily just hearing a sound. It's actually that that sound is maybe getting hooked into their other emotional centers of their brain. I wonder if you think there's a way of connecting them or thinking about them in the same way. In that regard, yes. I mean, what makes them different is that tinnitus, it's a sound that doesn't exist in the external world. In Mesophonia, it is so about an actual physical sound. So when you think about their upstream, how are they elicited? They couldn't be more different. But they become very similar when you think about the common relationship they share between this emotional response to activity that's flowing out of the auditory centers of the brain. Someone else wrote in and was talking about rather than trying to get rid of tinnitus, trying to embrace it. Has that ever been a conversation you've had to maybe even try to see the beauty in tinnitus? I think about those guitar cases that as somebody has owned a guitar for a while, it just accumulates dings and dents. As we age, our bodies accumulate injuries and the world has acted on it. It is me and this is my guitar case. It's not brand new. So I really love the spirit of that suggestion. If you experience it as other, you experience it as being assaulted by it. It's irrepressible. I want to oppress it. It is an adversarial relationship. And of course, it's going to bother you. You're going to come to hate it. If you understand that it is being produced by you, it is a part of you, that's nice. I mean, I say all this, I'm a researcher because I don't accept tinnitus. I don't think that people should have to get used to it. I think there is a way to silence it. And I am totally hell bent. It consumes my every waking professional moment of how we actually going to be able to do this. So I don't mean to just offer the glib advice of try to embrace it, but at the same time, it's a good approach in the absence of some wonderful therapy that my labr of clinician will come up with. You got to use the tools available to you. That's the one that we all have. I was talking to a musician I play with who told me that he's had tinnitus for a while because of playing loud music without earplugs. And he told me that when he thinks about his tinnitus, it shows him how much of what we hear is kind of like a trick our brain is playing on us. And it reminded me of what you said last time we talked. You said the brain doesn't have direct contact with the physical world. So everything we perceive as consciousness is constructed from the activity of our brain. Yeah. And I guess I just wonder, does working on tinnitus make you amazed or surprised or humbled by what the brain can do? Oh my gosh, yes. Yes. Yeah. It seems like so ineffable. How does the brain work? You're like, good luck figuring that out. You almost need a foothold. So tinnitus is so... You would never design a brain that way, you think. But it's one of those flaws that there's that line that medicine is the great tutor of biology, that by studying these sort of exceptional cases, when the human body doesn't work as it should, that you actually figure out how it manages to work at all. And so, yeah, studying tinnitus gives me a foothold to study those operations and appreciate them more. Because to know that it can fail in this very specific mode gives me insight into how it works normally. And it fuels a huge amount of the research we do in the lab. It makes me appreciate that it works, you know, 99% of the time. This was the fifth installment of our Sound Barrier Series. I keep putting these out once in a while, so let us know if you have any thoughts or suggestions or questions you want us to look into on the science of hearing. We've also heard from a few teachers who've wanted to use some of the stuff from our series for their students. If you're using any of our episodes in the classroom, please let us know. We'd love to hear about different ways you're using them. And if you need resources, we're always here, so feel free to give us a shout. This episode was produced by me, now I'm Hasn't Feld, I also wrote the music, editing from Jorge Just with help from Joanna Salataraf, who's also running the show, mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala, and fact checking from Melissa Hirsch. Sally Helm is trying to take over the sky, Amy Padula is trying to take over the sea. Meredith Haudenot is our senior supervising producer, Julia Lungoria is our editorial director, and Bird Pinkerton took off toward the platypuses. Where's Plattie, she yelled? Where's Plattie? Finally, one of the platypuses pointed toward a hole in some tributes by the river, and just barely sticking out of a hole, there was a small guitar. Thanks to all the listeners who sent in emails or voice memos for this episode, Brett, Haley, Alex, Daniel, Daniel, Dan, Alessandro J, Robin Glenn, Gordon Sarah, David Mary Brad, and so many more of you that we didn't get to feature. Every sound in the first half of this episode came from your recordings. I really can't tell you how much it means to me that you listened so carefully, and that you wrote in with such thoughtful and generous messages. Thank you. Thanks also to Vartica Sharma and Paige Vickers for the artwork for the Sound Barrier series. Thanks as always to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show along with me and Bird. Any of 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 into supporting the show even more and all Vox in general, join our membership program. You can go to Vox.com slash members to sign up. And during the holidays this year, your membership actually goes further. When you join Vox as an annual member, we're going to gift a complimentary membership to a reader facing financial barriers. You can read more about all of this at the same site, Vox.com slash members. Unexplainable as part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we will see you next time.
