The Quietest Place On Earth Will Cause You To Hallucinate In 45 Minutes

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Industry Tap reports that there is a place so quiet you can hear your heart beat, your lungs breathe and your stomach digest. It's the anechoic chamber at Orfield Labs in Minnesota where 3ft of sound-proofing fiberglass wedges and insulated steel and concrete absorbs 99.99% of sound, making it the quietest place in the world. 'When it's quiet, ears will adapt,' says the company's founder and president, Steven Orfield. '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.' The chamber is used by a multitude of manufacturers, to test how loud their products are and the space normally rents for $300 to $400 an hour. 'It's used for formal product testing, for research into the sound of different things — heart valves, the sound of the display of a cellphone, the sound of a switch on a car dashboard.' But the strangest thing about the chamber is that sensory deprivation makes the room extremely disorienting, and people can rarely stay in the dark space for long. As the minutes tick by in absolute quiet, the human mind begins to lose its grip, causing test subjects to experience visual and aural hallucinations. 'We challenge people to sit in the chamber in the dark — one reporter stayed in there for 45 minutes,' says Orfield who says even he can't stand the quiet for more than about 30 minutes. Nasa uses a similar chamber to test its astronauts putting them in a water-filled tank inside the room to see 'how long it takes before hallucinations take place and whether they could work through it.'"

Comments

Not if you have tinnitus?

[gr8dude]

With this condition you will always be exposed to some other forms of sound - would this prevent the hallucinations?

After all, your senses are not fully deprived of input.

Re:Not if you have tinnitus?

[CubicleZombie]

I have tinnitus from going to night clubs and frat parties in college. I can't sleep at night without a fan and this chamber would drive me nuts.

Kids: Wear your friggen earplugs. You may look like a dork, but trust me, someday you will wish you had. You know that ringing you hear after leaving a concert? Someday you'll hear that all the time and it never, ever goes away.

Re:Chamber

[complete loony]

I've only managed to stick my head into a much smaller quiet space for a few seconds. The silence hits you like the chiming of Old Tom at Unseen University.

Or so I've heard...

Re:BULL CRAP!

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd love to experience deafness? That can be arranged.

Vacuum

[Roger W Moore]

Given all the vacuum chambers on earth I also doubt it is the quietest place on earth. The quietest with air perhaps but not necessarily quietest overall.

Re:Vacuum

[ShanghaiBill]

You're not measuring the temperature of a vacuum, there's nothing to measure.

Yes there is. If you put a thermometer inside a perfect vacuum chamber, and put that chamber inside a room at 20 Celsius, the thermometer will (eventually) reach thermal equilibrium and read 20 Celsius. Objects exchange heat with their environment in three ways: conduction, convection, and radiation. A vacuum only stops the first two.

Re:Vacuum

[BattleApple]

Wouldn't that just tell you the temperature of the thermometer itself? If the thermometer isn't there to receive heat by radiation, does the vacuum have a temp?

Re:BULL CRAP!

[Jarik C-Bol]

Not what it says. It says when it gets THAT quiet, and you start hearing your own bodily functions, like (i.e., heart beating, lungs processing air, blood rushing through veins) that it tends to mess with your head. Deaf people, by virtue of being deaf, hear none of those things.

Re:So, build your own

[WizardFusion]

+1 Strangely informative and disturbing at the same time

Re:Wait a second!

[sumdumass]

Right. There is a difference between no skund and not being able to hear it. Also this chamber locks out about all other external stimulus except for gravity.i would think that might be a bit different then just being deaf

Re:BULL CRAP!

[ElectricTurtle]

What you're failing to see is that if you spend decades adapting to a world of sounds, having that yanked away will fuck you up. Most deafness is either congenital or progressive, so it's either all you know or something you adapted to. If you look at cases of people who are suddenly deaf, you'll find similar problems adapting.

By the same token, people who were deaf who through new surgical methods are made to be able to hear, actually have a very hard time adapting to it. We who can hear take for granted the period in infancy when we develop the mental capacity to reflexively filter out background noises and such. People who were deaf lack the automatic mental controls, and in a sense, can't stop hearing, which makes it hard for them to focus on specific sounds (and hard to sleep). It's so bad that some even have the surgery reversed and voluntarily go back to being deaf because to them it's better than a sense of hearing that they can't control.

Re:Nein

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Cool, a space that can be built for a few thousand $ that rents for $300-$400/HR!