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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.'"
I'd guess it would make it worse. You'd still be deprived of external input, so you'd be hearing the tinnitus almost exclusively.
I have mild tinnitus. In normal environments I'm not aware of it, but when the room is quiet I notice it. In this chamber it'd probably drive me crazy, hallucinations or no.
FWIW, mine started after a severe cold and has never diminished in the seven years since.
Sadly not surprising. Hell, I believe even solitary confinement should be tossed out as a form of psychological torture.
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Are you sure that deaf people don't hear ANYTHING? Or, maybe they simply can't hear the same way you or I do?
I know for a fact that deaf people can sense vibrations, and sound is nothing more than vibration. Your ear is specially designed to make sense of a particular type of vibrations.
What about bone induction?
I googled "hearing without ears" and got a boatload of hits. Some look pretty interesting, some look less interesting. Try it yourself.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
It would be interesting to see the reaction of a competent yogi in there. They study exactly that: excluding sensory input and generating alternate mind states.
It's not exact, but I did run across an unusual and unlikely method of simulating the sensation. In high school I was helping make props for a play. We were coating party balloons in paper mache. After it had dried a bit, we popped the balloon and removed it. As a joke, one of us held the hole up to our ear, half expecting to "hear the ocean" like you do from a seashell. The result instead was silence and a feeling of low pressure, as if your eardrum were being sucked out. It wasn't just me either - everyone who tried it reported the same sensation.
Years later when I went into an anechoic chamber for a hearing test, I recognized the same feeling. It isn't "silence" like when you're in a quiet room. The minute echos tell you you're still in a room. It's more like an open emptiness, with a similar feeling of low pressure against my ears. Close your eyes and you can't tell you're in a room.
I think the low pressure sensation is psychosomatic. When you ride a plane, the pressure change mutes the sounds you can hear as well as puts pressure on your eardrum. The quiet of the anechoic chamber or the paper mache balloon is very much like the muting of sound you get from a pressure change. And I think the brain automatically concludes you must be experiencing a pressure change, and makes up the sensation of low pressure.
I had a go in the UK Plantronics anechoic chamber last year on a factory visit. They have a webcam, and an egg timer on the wall. It's not odd for people to weird out if they spend any time in the chamber. The (digital) egg timer was there so you could set it for 30 minutes and it would hopefully snap you out of any spin you got yourself into.
I was in there for no more than five minutes, and it was extremely disorientating. You really can hear the blood in your ears. It's very much like the sound you get from sea shells. I can easily imagine losing my shit in short order in there.
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Tinnitus is no fun in low noise environments as your ears seem to be awash in it. It seems really loud and overbearing, since it is all you hear. That kind of thing happens when you get your hearing tested and you have it (as I do). When they start doing threshold of hearing tests and the sounds they make are really quiet, the tinnitus seems massive and overpowering. Then you take off the headphones and leave the booth and it vanishes.
Interesting point. But can we really call a place where sound doesn't exist "quiet". In the same way we can't call vacuum "cold" because there is no temperature.
The air in an anechoic chamber actually makes things stop vibrating whereas vacuum merely prevents the sound from propagating.
Back in the 90's I spent some extended time in a sensor deprivation chamber.
Nothing as fancy as this place. Not even remotely close. Just a salt water tank and a really really dark and quite environment.
I can tell you I was Hallucinating in far less than 45 minutes when I was in a sensory deprivation tank. Auditory hallucination was the first. Then physical sensory. Then finally visual. I can't comment on temperature. I had no memory of anything to do with temperature. Pain was there, but I am a bit confused if it was a memory of a memory or if I actually felt in while in the tank.
I was in their for about a week. It was suppose to be longer. But I got pulled out when people got worried. Apparently I was not exhibiting an EEG with in expected norms. What ever that means. I used to know more about the results. But that was 20 years ago.
The hallucinations got so intense that I believed them. This only took a relatively short time. No way of telling how short really. Nothing really weird, or dangerous. I substituted what I believed to be a real world environment. Yes responses from others were to easy and terse. Which was odd. The most unusual thing was travel. Traveling distances took little time at all. Rather I don't remember details of travel. Things that you would normally remember. There is always something about a journey you remember. In the tank I didn't have those memories. I always felt rather dis-connected after travel in my hallucinations.
I was completely freaked out when they started to revive me. They started with light and then some sound in the tank. Apparently I resisted it. I forced my eyes shut and made funny faces when the light and sound started. It really was hard to accept my environment. It felt like it all went down in a few minutes. But apparently the process was over an hour.
What you do for a little Uni cash.
PS. Yes they hooked up tubes to my bits. That was more disturbing coming out than in. I'll never forget that.
It is really interesting that in absence of auditory and visual sensory input, the brain quickly fills the void with false experiences. It could just go into quiet mode instead. I like the idea that all of what our brain does is building a representation of our environment and trying to anticipate inputs based on this "simulation".
The solitary confinement scene in the movie "The Hurricane" gives a pretty good rendition of what it is like to go "stir crazy". If you want to try it out yourself just stay awake for 2-3 days. Weird sensation, you know the sound or vision is not real but it just won't go away, the visual ones are usually a real object that looks and "acts" like something else, usually something bizarre or impossible. Most of mine have been more comical than horrific, some can be downright helpful such as the "angels" who flew along either side of the wife's car, tapped on the window, and gently reminded her to open her eyes when she was nodding off at the wheel.
Hallucinations are normal, some have more than others. Probably the worst thing you can do is treat them as an illness (or demon).
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Maybe longer would do it.
Yep, longer will do it, I'd find it very difficult to believe someone can go without sleep for five days without hallucinating. I worked on a fishing trawler in the southern ocean. Every voyage lasted about 3 days. That's no sleep for 70+ hours, 30-35 of them working straight through to fill the hold, only stopping for 30 min every 5hrs to get something to eat, the other half of the time was normally spent holding on for dear life in the "roaring forties" between the Islands and the mainland
Driving home in twilight on a country road after my first voyage, a row of white goblins suddenly ran single file across the highway, they were about 3 foot tall with one big red "Cyclops" eye that took up their entire face . They kept coming out of the thick scrub all in neat single file, every one of them looking straight at me, running for their lives and showing no signs of breaking formation even though I'm driving straight at them at 100km/h.
I hit the brakes even though I kept telling myself in my head that it wasn't real, I hadn't yet realised I was hallucinating and could not work out what the fuck was going on, and whatever they were I certainly didn't want to hit them. I noticed that as I slowed down so did the "goblins", when I was nearly stopped I just as "suddenly" realised it was the row of white guide posts with the red reflectors that you get on hazardous stretches of highway. They appeared to be running across the road because I was approaching a long right hand bend. I hadn't been looking at where the goblins were going until I was almost stopped. What was left of my attention was focused on where the goblins were coming from. As soon as I looked to the left to see where they were going, it broke the illusion.
It was only then I realised I had been hallucinating. Further down the road on that 30 minute trip I saw a large "beast" on a semi trailer. it looked a bit like an elephant or a hippo lying on it's back with it's legs straight up and in chains, before I could put a finger on what type of animal it was it morphed into a log truck carrying two stacks of short logs. A bit further down the road there was a (very fat) aborigine sitting under a tree at the side of the road sporting a loin cloth and yellow corroboree spots on his body, that turned out to be a large lichen covered rock. As I was showering and crawling into bed someone kept speaking my name every few minutes.
I worked the boats for about 6 months (circa 1980), the goblins were the best but also the most disorientating. Once you realise what's going on and start expecting it to happen they don't seem to last as long or appear as frequently. Some people can sleep on a 60' fishing trawler in high seas, most can't, some of those (ordinary) people see really fucked up shit that stops them going out to sea again. Personally I quite enjoyed the audio and visual effects my brain throws back at me when it's protesting a lack of sleep. I can see why Alice was so curious about the rabbit hole, needless to say I got the wife to pick me up from the docks after that first voyage. I slept a solid 24hrs after every "trip", curiously about the same amount of sleep I had missed over the previous 3 days.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
When I lost my hearing at 17 from spinal meningitis, I was out for a week - lost consciousness from the pain and nearly died - and when I woke up, it was just tinnitus. I saw people moving their lips, so I knew they were talking, but no sound. It was weird, but I got used to it quickly enough. What took longer to get used to was the social isolation. Though not intentional, I basically lost my friends. Only one person in my group of school friends bothered to learn sign language to communicate with me. Only one family member out of seven bothered to learn sign language. Two others tried, but butchered any attempt at it. Really, it's not that hard to learn or use. Lack of sound - not a big deal. Lack of communication? Much bigger deal.
When I got my cochlear implant, we worked on improving the sound quality for a period of about six weeks, and at the end of the sessions, my hearing was about as good as I remembered, except in noisy situations, where comprehension drops greatly because I don't have the filtering ability anymore: it all comes as one block of sound and the CI can't adapt like our brain does, automatically. Other than that, I had no problem adjusting to hearing again. In fact, it was like a new lease on life. But, I know of congenitally deaf people, as you describe, that reject CIs because they don't know what to do with the new sensory input. That, plus growing up deaf, learning things through sign language instead of speech, it makes it a bizzaro world transition: they don't know how to handle our "normal." I feel bad for those folks.