Here’s a worthy challenge: Try escaping the daily din of American life. It’s not easy. Maybe, for instance, you don’t actually want to hear Wolf Blitzer’s voice blaring from every TV planted in a public space. Who’d blame you?
Unfortunately, most of us are constantly assaulted by a never-ending bleating, clanging, whirring, and buzzing — the raucous background music of 21st-century civilization.
It’s more than merely annoying, which would be plenty bad enough. It also undermines our ability to work productively. Worse, it may be doing harm to our brains.
While the cacophony is not an entirely new phenomenon — except for the chirps of our omnipresent tech devices — it nevertheless constitutes a palpable torture for many of us. You know that androgynous figure who expresses universally understood “agony” in Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream? Well, then you get the idea.
The most troubling part of noise pollution is that it can result in permanent hearing loss, anxiety, and hypertension. Some say even coronary artery disease. Such trauma! At the very least, don’t we all badly need some alone time, where we can focus? An obviously good idea, I’d say. It is hardly a surprise, then, that so many of our fellow Americans seek refuge in the isolation of parks and forests.
Noise is, of course, a serious problem chiefly in urban areas. It was in New York City, unsurprisingly, where she could no longer abide the background roar, that Julia Barnett Rice, wife of a wealthy businessman, founded the Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise. That was 113 years ago. Mark Twain signed on as spokesperson for the group. Its one lasting legacy: the widespread adoption of legally enforced quiet zones around schools and hospitals.
Mice, when exposed to two hours of silence every day, developed new cells in the region of the brain that controls memory, emotion, and learning.
But even far from our cities, anti-noise battles rage. Those who lead the charge — arguing for better noise-abatement legislation and comity among oft-disrespectful neighbors — do so with increasing evidence to support the cause.
These days, they can bring to their campaigns evidence showing that quiet is provably beneficial. Six years ago, the journal Brain Structure and Function published a study indicating that mice, when exposed to two hours of silence every day, developed new cells in the region of the brain that controls memory, emotion, and learning. Not exactly a duh! moment in the annals of laboratory experimentation, but a revelation nevertheless.
Additionally, recent studies — with humans — offer yet more support for those of us who believe that quiet is among our basic human rights — the right to maintain our personal well-being. People who meditate, this research has found, often see a significant delay in the onset of brain deterioration. In essence, by carving out a quiet interlude every day, meditators remain intellectually youthful longer.
These discoveries free those of us who long for a quieter country to confront our neighbors about such matters as dogs that just will not stop barking. Or, more urgently, streaming rappers who just will not stop rapping. At the very least, in our cranky way, we can present Actual Science to explain why the noise sets us off. All we want, after all, are fresh brain cells.
And then there is the enduring mystery of what’s known as the Hum, an anomalous, barely detectable noise heard almost everywhere around the world. Does it come from electromagnetic signals? Underground pipelines? No one knows. But scientists keep looking into the Hum. However bad it is, in my opinion it’s not nearly as maddening as many amateur YouTube videos. So, for now, I choose to sit — in quiet, when possible — and blissfully ignore its existence.
In the last issue, Cable Neuhaus wrote about luxury sneakers.
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Comments
I asked some time ago of The Saturday Evening Post if I could get permission to reprint The Quiet Diet by Cable Neuhas in my lake association newsletter. I felt I was a bit rebuffed. The answer I received is that Cable is a freelance writer and The Post can not give authorization nor could you provide any help. But when I indicated since it was on the web I should be able to use it as I wish, you were quick to respond in the negative. To me, that is rather a government answer of “Its not my job”, or “Just try it and then we will penalize you”. Since then I have surfed the web to see if there was a way to contact Cable. So far I have found him prominent on the web but I find no way to seek his permission. Most everything I see and read by him is in The Post. It would seem to me that someone at The Post would have the knowledge, initiative, and time to help me with an answer. I ask once again for permission to use this article – The Quiet Diet. Please advise. Thank you.
Yes, we now have moral authority to confront our neighbors about their music, which occasionally raises the blood pressure of the nonfan to genuinely dangerous levels, but only if we’re willing to face the possibility of having to confront gunfire in return.
Now, obviously, this is the business of government if anything is: to enforce laws which limit the volume of music to a level at which it truly cannot disturb a neighbor.
Short of constantly wearing earplugs, a lot of the noise pollution we’re subjected to is beyond our control in NOT hearing. If only it was as easy as choosing not to pay over $1,500 for luxury sneakers! This is one reason (aside from lack of time) that I keep the television off. The majority of the ads now are basically screaming at you. A lot don’t make it clear what they’re advertising while screaming either.
Automotive ads are among the worst. Even the quieter ones are mentally grueling. Lexus will trudge out their tired ‘December to Remember’ ads with a husband surprising his wife with some $50k car or SUV on Christmas morning, like it’s nothing. Cadillac has a variant of that. November is Chevy truck month! Isn’t every month though? (It is.)
This is just just more junk we don’t need to hear. Americans overall seem to abhor the sound of silence, which would go with the lack of respect for sleep and downtime. Greed, technology stupidity and ignorance have created the perfect storm of why this country is almost always on high red alert with drama from the President on down. Caffeine, nicotine, tech addictions, toxic entertainment, lack of any hope, the 24/7 society? These factors and more are why things have short-circuited people out to the point of even more frequent mass shootings, bad behavior on air flights, drunken pilots, cars crashing into businesses, planes crashing into homes nearly every day? Yes.
Noise pollution plays more of a role in all of this than it might appear. On the other hand, you’ve got millions of Americans seeking oblivion to escape it all in a marijuana haze like never before. They’re looking for an ‘off’ switch. Can you blame them?