Kevin's Watch

How Long Could You Last in the World’s Quietest Room? The Record Is Only 45 Minutes.


World's quietest room

With what seems like a constant need to chatter away on cellphones or listen to music with earbuds, a little quiet time may be in order. We’ve got the perfect place: the Guinness Book of World Records’s quietest room.

It’s so quiet the longest anyone has been able to stand it before beginning to go a bit batty was 45 minutes — to be fair, part of that challenge was to remain in the dark too. According to the Daily Mail, the “anechoic chamber” at Orfield Laboratories in South Minneapolis is 99.9 percent sound absorbing.

The Daily Mail reports the room is made with 3.3-foot-thick fiberglass acoustic wedges with walls made of insulated steel and a foot of concrete. Founder and president of the lab, Steven Orfield, shared some of his thoughts about why individuals find it hard to last in the room for lengthy periods of time.

“When it’s quiet, ears will adapt. The quieter the room, the more things you hear. You’ll hear your heart beating, sometimes you can hear your lungs, hear your stomach gurgling loudly.

“In the anechoic chamber, you become the sound.”

And this is a very disorientating experience. Mr Orfield explained that it’s so disconcerting that sitting down is a must.

He said: “How you orient yourself is through sounds you hear when you walk. In the anechnoic chamber, you don’t have any cues. You take away the perceptual cues that allow you to balance and manoeuvre. If you’re in there for half an hour, you have to be in a chair.”

Because the chamber is so soundless, NASA has conducted tests on its astronauts in there to simulate what it would sound like in space. Orfield said manufacturers, like Harley Davidson and Whirlpool, have also used the chamber to test how loud their products are or to evaluate sound quality.

I would LOVE to give it a try, but I would like to lay down. think it would be a very freeing experience.

lorin wrote:I would LOVE to give it a try, but I would like to lay down. think it would be a very freeing experience.

You boarded the same "but, wouldn't it be cool if...." train I did when I first read it...because lets face it, they are freaking stupid [the various summaries articles are highlighting/framing as conclusions...I can't believe the actual scientists are saying things totally idiotic].
Why stupid? That Mr. Orfield [for example] "you must sit, cuz you orient by sound."
Really? so....there are no deaf people who can walk?
I hate hyperbolic reductions. They should start where you say, and go from there.

Good point. And I'd like to try it, too.

I agree that it would be harder to stay there for long in the dark. But deaf-and-blind people don't all go crazy, either.

I think it would be cool, as long as you could freely decide when you've had enough.

Some friends and I once spelunked down into a cave that was a tunnel about 1/4 mile long (very narrow, and in places the only way through was to crawl on your belly straight down and you couldn't see the person in front of you) ending in a chamber large enough for several people, with a high roof. After a while we shut the torches off and sat silently. There being no ambient sound at all, except our breathing, it was a very interesting experience.

The record for staying in this room is 45 minutes.

Balance problems are very common in deaf people. Most deaf people are not totally deaf. Total deafness is defined as the inability to hear anything below 95 decibels. A jackhammer is 100 decibels. There are also many types of deafness. Some affect inner ear and/or ear to brain communcation differently.

Oh, bring it on! I wish there was one near me.

Hey, danlo needs to tell us about the time they forgot him in the sense-deprivation tank.

i would just fall asleep.

my last MRI i had a panic attack - so i decided to go with it. could feel my pulse increase, profuse sweat, flight mode kicked in, rapid breathing. then i decided to slow everything down. i slowed down so much i fell asleep. they had to wake me.

Yeah, I'd like to try it.

Deer's story reminds me of the time we abseiled down an abandoned mine shaft...had to walk through the mine to the entrance to get out again, and we stopped and turned off the headlamps...never seen darkness that dark before.

--A

I think a significant difference between people who can hear who try out this room, and deaf people, is the fact that most deaf people don't walk into a room and suddenly become deaf. They have time to adjust.

But the main difference between this and deaf people is that it's not the total absence of sound, but the absence of echoes and external sound, so that you become the sound, as the article stated. This, too, is entirely different from what a deaf person would experience. In fact, until this room was constructed, humans simply had no experience with this type of hearing. It would be almost "solipsistic" hearing. Cutting off one's perceptions at the boundary of the self, without any cues to impart an external world. I do think that would be disorienting, and since none of us have ever experienced it, we can't really draw any analogy to what it would be like.

Personally, I would not like to try it, because my tinnitus would become even more pronounced in my awareness. Most of the time, I can drown out the ringing in my ears because it's not that bad, but at night when the house is quiet, it becomes irritating.

Yeah, I sometimes have that problem with the ringing. I sometimes wonder if there was a loud noise that I don't remember that caused it. If I had that all the time, I'd also not want to try it.

But I don't understand why this is so unique. I'm sure I heard about rooms like this, and the odd noise many people reported turned out to be air molecules bouncing off of their eardrums.

In my case, I know exactly what caused my ringing. A screaming/singing/cheering kid on my back at a Rush show for two hours. His head right behind my ear. Luckily, he was my own kid, or I'd be pissed. I put ear plugs in his ears to protect his hearing. I wish I'd done the same for myself.

I'm sure this room is not unique in its intent, but just the degree to which that intent was achieved. We've been making recording studios and sound rooms for decades. However, the experience of an entirely echo-less and silent environment is a unique human experience until the development of such places. Even an astronaut would hear his own breath and voice sounding like it was in an enclosed environment, like a tin can, bouncing off the inside of his spacesuit. Very claustrophobic, I'd imagine. Ditto a sensory deprivation tank (sound still travels and reflects through water). A set of theoretically 100% effective ear plugs wouldn't be the same, either, because you wouldn't hear your body's noises "normally," i.e. from the "outside," except minus the external cues of those noises occurring and interacting with an environment--as you would in this room. This would be more like a virtual reality set to a "blank" world setting. You'd be the only thing (audibly) real.

Hmmm, interesting question.

I think it would sound odd...maybe lack resonance or something.

--A

Are there stipulations about what you can do while in the room? I mean, it looks a bit dull - all that brown zig-zag padding (I guess). If it had some beautiful pictures to contemplate - or you could take a TC book in with you.......


(that wouldn't include a third Chrons book of course - no help there from sensory depravation induced madness occuring. )