Can You Hear Silence? Scientists Suggest the Answer is “Yes”
I’m sure you have experienced some time in your life some awkward moments of silence during a conversation. Well, have you ever thought more about that silence? It has long been agreed upon that our brains interpret silence as a gap between periods of sound. However, some scientists believe otherwise and have just completed a study that proves silence could be “heard.”
The study, conducted by scientists and researchers at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), concluded a centuries-old philosophical debate between the two views of perceptual (we hear silence) and cognitive (we infer silence). Through seven experiments, the researchers showed that silence can replace sounds in auditory illusions and that our brains think of silence as a “sound.” However, research is still needed to know how our brains specifically interpret the two.
And that brings us to a more fuzzy topic: What is silence exactly? It is common knowledge a healthy homo sapiens hears on a sound spectrum from 20Hz to 20,000Hz, and depending on factors like your gender, age, and other health factors, your hearing range may vary, but usually within those limits. Sounds on a frequency below 20Hz are known as infrasounds, while those above 20,000Hz are ultrasounds, both of which we can’t hear.
Of course, as it usually is with humans, a bigger brain means we trade with nature and let go of some evolutionary traits. Examples of those tradeoffs are humans don’t have claws (besides fingernails), can’t breathe underwater, and don’t run fast compared to animals like the cheetah. And hearing is no exception; even dogs have better hearing than us, with a hearing range between 40Hz to 60,000Hz. And don’t even let me get started on the hearing of bats, which can hear everything up to 200,000Hz, well into the ultrasonic range. In that sense, humans are virtually deaf to the sound spectrum, with so many sounds that we can’t perceive with our ears.
It could be that what we perceive as a soundless moment is when there is an absence of sound that we can hear, though that does not mean there aren’t ultrasounds and infrasounds. Although we can’t hear those sounds, we can feel it through other senses. Research also suggests that our brains try to fill complete silence with sounds, contributing to the auditory hallucinations phenomenon, where we think we hear something that isn’t there.
I believe that further research into this field and why the above get held up as fact is necessary, as it opens up a door into the complex workings of our brains and conscience. We already know the auditory cortex in the centre of the human brain does the job of transforming electric pulses from the ears into meaningful sound. The new study gives us some insight through “auditory illusions,” but there is so much we still don’t know about our brains!
What are your thoughts after reading this article? Have you ever experienced auditory hallucinations or moments when your brain acted funky? Post your experiences in the comments. That’s the end of this production from the New News Newsminute, where we do our best to bring to our subscribers the most relevant stories happening worldwide. Thank you for reading and your support, and remember to share this article so no one will miss out on the latest.