Silence is worth seeking

 From Comfort Crisis:

Silence is worth seeking, even if it's uncomfortable at first.  Where can we find unadulterated natural silence? An acoustic ecologists (real job, apparently) named Gordon Hempton traveled the country in search of silence.  He now believes that there are only 12 places in the Lower 48 where we can sit for 15 minutes and not hear a single noise created by humans.  No droning planes, trains, automobiles. No blaring TVs, cellphones, or radios.  Just natural soundscape. Some of these 12 places are spots in Minnesota's Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Hawaii's Haleakala National Park, and Washington's Hoh River Valley. 

Steven Orfield, Orfield Labs, buys an "anechoic chamber."  This is in a section about the benefits of silence for PTSD and "the production of more cels in an area of the brain that fights depression" and "that two minutes of silence led to the bigger drops in measures of relaxation like blood pressure and heart and breathing rate compared to a handful of other relaxation techniques."

When people first enter the chamber, they feel uncomfortable with the silence, said Orfield.  The lack of noise is a sensation unlike any they've had. "But then people start to calm down," he said. And they become progressively more pacified, during which their perception of sound recalibrates and begins to settle.  Then they reach the 30-minute mark.

"That's when people start to hear the sounds their ears make," said Orfield. "Then they hear their heart beat, and the joints in their arms and legs moving.  Some people hear the flowing in their lungs and the blood from their arotid arery spreading into their brain.  People go into the chamber thinking they're going to hear silence.  But what they get is the sound of themselves." The thing about silence is that it's nowhere, indeed.