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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.'"
Cool, a real geodesic psychoisolation chamber
Some people [pointedly looking at neighbors] need external sounds to mask the quiet in their heads. The quieter the head, the louder the noi^Wmusic.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Hmmm give me some booze and a bucket. I bet I can beat that
I've spent over an hour in a sensory deprivation tank and it wasn't nearly as trippy as this makes is sound.... Maybe longer would do it.
I've been in an anechoic chamber - it is quite strange, when you talk it feels like your voice is being sucked out of you.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
And people who are deaf are all out of their minds?
No wonder deaf people are always flailing their arms at each other. It all makes perfect sense now!
Not having reached the point that I can ignore all external stimuli, that sounds like a place I could work on inner stillness, at least. Too bad it's so far from where I live; I'd like to try a few individual hours.
it's looking into the future
and hyped lame at that. The effect of sensory deprivation chambers is well known. This is not a sensory deprivation chamber. The act of feeling gravity press on various parts of the body will break the detachment of mind from the constant orientating signals from the body. In other words I don't believe this crap. Deaf people somehow don't constantly hallucinate even in total darkness. Sensory deprivation chambers were refined so that the currents in the fluid that supported the body were diffuse as the presence of just the little bit of feedback such a wee current pressing against the body will break the detachment of mind from body and keep hallucination from happening. There were other little things that had to be addressed in order for the deprivation to work. Just a quiet and dark room is not enough and what is required was well documented. This is a lame add wrapped in a hyped unlikely assertion.
Earplugs still don't drown out all noise.
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.
The saddest poem
According to the linked article, NASA doesn't use "a similar chamber", they use *THAT* chamber...
You can still hear, though. Sound waves can travel through your nose and mouth, and through your bones. In that room there's no sound, at all. Anything you hear will come from inside your own body.
I wouldn't last more than a minute there, though. I become anxious within a few minutes of wearing earplugs, and I need them to swim underwater.
I think they just found a new enhanced interrogation technique.
I stole this Sig
You'd love to experience deafness? That can be arranged.
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.
It's $300-$400 per hour—the real reason nobody can stand to be in for so long. You have to get out early before they charge you for the next hour.
Is there a way to simulate this without spending $400? Serious question.
Take off every 'sig'!
All your 'sig' are belong to us!
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
I wouldn't want to be there.
Dig a hole about forty or fifty feet deep. Make a monolithic pour of waterproofed concrete. Install the insulation and the anechoic surfaces. You'll want at least a couple soundproof hatches in the access tunnel, maybe three or four, to eliminate noise from the wind or whatever.
With your own chamber in your back yard, you can deprive yourself anytime. When you tire of that, you can use it to hide your armory, or your gold, or dead bodies. Whatever needs to be hidden, you've got the place to hide it. Plan for the future though - a guy never knows just how many people he might meet who desperately need to be bludgeoned to death!
"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 isn't being advertised as a "sensory deprivation chamber". It's being advertised as a sound testing chamber. You are deprived of one sense, and one sense alone, in this chamber.
Phhttt.....
"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
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.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
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.
In that room there's no sound, at all...
So? Make some, its not like that they filled that chamber with a gas that you can breathe but it's soundproof.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
sad really, that this article doesn't even mention the inventor of the sensory isolation tank, the mad genius Dr. John C. Lilly
it was only the 70's, people, it wasn't that long ago!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Lilly
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.
yes, www.dotcomforwardslash.com is my real URL.
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.
That's what she said...
...ever gone into the anechoic chamber, on weeeed?
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
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.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
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.
A while ago 5 years now.. (how time flies) I ended up travelling across Eurasia on a motorbike. Passing through desolate areas like Kazakhstan and Siberia away from the railways would be a spooky experience. You'd put your tent up and it was so quiet you could hear your heart beat and your tinnitus. You would always think though that somebody was sneaking up on you and would stab you to death and rob you.
Not what it says. It says when it gets THAT quiet, and you start hearing your own bodily functions,
Correct. And THOSE sounds are what cause people to hallucinate. The this is an evolutionary defensive mechanism: Fixating on the subconscious thoughts that only those like me with Sleep Paralysis normally see while awake prevents humans from realizing that some truly heinous shit is brewing deep inside of everyone.
I don't have to go to a special chamber to hear MY bodily functions.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Yes. And people who are deaf are all out of their minds? Wow. What crap!
It's also about the contrast, for the people who are not deaf.
The ones who suddenly lose the majority of other sensory inputs they've gotten accustomed to, yes.
It's not "lack of sound" that causes hallucinations. It's the unusual circumstances that your brain isn't able to understand as easily as the normal world.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I thought this would be discussing my bedroom. Not much happens when there's a baby sleeping in the room across the hall.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Earplugs don't stop all outside sound but I was thinking the same thing....
anechoic chamber + nice bed = best sleep ever
Sounds like (no pun intended) it would be a great place to practice insight meditation
Hey I get that every night when I go to bed!! Then she rolls over :D
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
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".
Just to add one more element to the mix, Autism can often be marked by an inability to filter out noises and other sensory input. So the brain gets bombarded by input from all directions. Whereas neurotypical (those without Autism) can filter it out, those with Autism can feel like they are struggling to stay afloat in the sensory sea. People with Autism will often need time in a calm, low-sensory input environment to decompress after too much sensory input. (I know this both personally - I have Asperger's Syndrome/High Functioning Autism - and as a parent of a child with Asperger's Syndrome/High Functioning Autism.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
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.
Now now, relax, being curious about something is not the same as how you interpreted it.
I think he meant that he would love experience the room, not being deaf.
If he did mean being deaf "Do not attribute to malice, that which can be adequately explained by stupidity".
This is the sig that says NI (again)
...and made a documentary about it: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080360/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_85
I wonder if a person with hyperacusis might find a small amount of peace on one of these chambers. I'm already used to hearing my own bodily functions and frequently hear my heart pumping blood through my ears. Eventually you learn to cope with regular patters of noise, but random environmental sounds can drive you insane. You can't use ear plugs to get away from the problem for the same reasons mentioned in the article. Your ears adapt, and once the plugs come out the whole world seems like it is shouting at you.
for awhile, but I'd need to know any rules and such. I mean, this place isn't a full sensory deprivation chamber, it's just a silent room. So you can still see and such, I presume, or am I wrong? And can you talk? I would actually find it really fascinating, and not scary at all to hear my heartbeat and the blood rushing through my ears...
I think I'd have fun in there.
the "angels" who ...gently reminded her to open her eyes when she was nodding off at the wheel
Interesting. Sounds like a version of third man syndrome.
If you want to try it out yourself just stay awake for 2-3 days.
At uni we often stayed awake for a couple of day/nights at a time to get our assignments done. My personal record was 4 days and 3 nights. But, none of us had hallucinations that I'm aware of.
I might be out of my mind, but not from deafness. With my cochlear implant, I hear pretty much what I used to hear before I went deaf from spinal meningitis at age 17. Without my CI, it's just mild tinnitus. Either way, having been deaf for 30 years, I'm used to it. Aside from the boredom, this room would pose no problem for me at all.
Love to experience it? Just no. Imagine going to an interview for a job you really, really need - young family depends on you for food and shelter - and you can't even understand the small chat from the interviewer - "How was the trip here?" "Um, I... I... didn't understand the question, sir." "Oh, uh, never mind. Wasn't important." - let alone the substantive parts. People constantly think you're "stupid" because you're missing a source of input. You're never a part of a conversation; if you're lucky, someone will give you bits and pieces afterwards. You see everyone laughing, and maybe the joke wasn't that funny, but you never get to be a part of it, and if someone does bother to sign it to you, after the fact, it loses a lot in the retelling. Holiday get-togethers become the most dreaded occasions of the year: the isolation effect is amplified, and you end up playing with the dog, instead. You put your child down for a nap, and he ends up crying for 45 minutes, right in the next room, because you're busy working on something, and don't hear him. And on and on. Again, just no.
I believe that he was talking about wanting to experience being in the chamber, not wanting to be deaf.
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.
How long until the DEA makes these things illegal?
Just say NO to absolute silence.....
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I had a small computer room lined with Armstrong's 'Soundsoak' panels and before the equipment was installed, the effect was stunning. I found the silence to be literally painful to my ears.
In college, I was once up for seven days and nights during finals, and yes, I had hallucinations.
John Cage's experience in an anechoic chamber was instrumental to much of his thinking about music and silence. Or at least it made for a good anecdote that he used quite often:
"There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. For certain engineering purposes, it is desirable to have as silent a situation as possible. Such a room is called an anechoic chamber, its six walls made of special material, a room without echoes. I entered one at Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation. Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music."
Thru a buddy I got a mini tour of JBL's research lab and they had an anechoic chamber to test speaker designs. I got to spend a few minutes in the anechoic chamber and it was strange but cool sensation. First the floor was a suspended wire mesh so almost like floating, then when door was closed I starting to hear my own body and nothing else, excellent. I'd love to have an anechoic chamber or a float tank to zone out in.
My wife bought me noise canceling in-ear headphones; they work surprisingly well. I have found this to be a little disorienting when you do something like open a bag of chips and there is no external noise, but it seems like the bag-crinkle noise is conducted through your body and you sort of hear it inside your head - strange. Crunching is too weird, I have to turn them off. Great on airplanes and trains though!
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
No, there is no true "waterproof" concrete. But, you CAN choose mixes that are less porous than others. The average driveway is poured with 3000 lb concrete, which may or may not actually be 3000 pound if you have a cheat supplying the concrete. When the concrete arrives on site, it's usually watered down, making your questionable mix even sorrier.
Specifying your mix to a high grade, then adding some good stuff tends to make the concrete stronger, more resistant to cracking and spalling, AND less porous. Less porous concrete will pass a lot less water, or none at all, depending on location, water table, and other minor details.
Oh - digging a hole 50 feet deep can get expensive. It depends on whether you are following OSHA guidelines or not. There are a LOT of deep holes in this world that were dug before OSHA ever existed. My father in law dug a number of them. Ever heard the term, "Colder than a well digger's ass"? Admittedly, FIL never dug a well that was dug out at the bottom to create a larger room, or chamber, but he certainly dug some wide enough to provide room for a man to sit on the bottom in a nice cushioned chair. Maybe enough room for a very small end table to hold your beer, too.
"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
Not necessarily. There are tons of stupid people who are too stupid to be malicious.
There is actually no temperature in a vacuum. That is assuming that one is speaking scientifically in that a vacuum is an absolute lack of matter in a certain volume of space. It would not even be described as absolute zero, because without any matter what temperature could you measure? On the other hand, if you're talking about a vacuum as in the thing that sucks crap out of your carpet, then yes it has matter and therefore would have a measurable temperature.
I think you're forgetting that people can learn to lip-read?
Ever considered replacing the speaker in the baby monitor with a small electric motor? You wouldn't be able to understand a conversation, but you should be able to differentiate quiet noises from loud ones, quick short noises for ongoing. etc.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I always thought it was odd. We have the technology to make implants like these. Why don't we have the ability to make them so that we can selectively turn them on or off? A lot of the stories I have heard about deaf folks rejecting CIs have been exactly what you said: they couldn't adapt to having sound on all the time. So why can't we make it so where they can turn it on or off at will? Heck, that almost puts them a step above everyone else; I know I wish I could mute the world at times.
But the rest of your office mates desperately wish that you would.
I welcome our new 99% overlords.
I sort of imagine that working along the lines of (and i greatly simplify here) some part of the brain goes "Huh, not receiving any input from outside. Must be asleep. Better turn on the dreams." Because honestly, if you think about it, dreams are so weird and random, you would consider them hallucinations if you where not unconscious at the time.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
No, that doesn't work. Too much information is lost. Unless you have a very narrow range of guesses of what they might be saying, you have no chance of understanding.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
At least when I was in my late 20s staying a wake 2-3 days didn't produce hallucinations. It did result in some pretty bad code, though. But I got the project in by the deadline. (I think I was awake for four days that time, though towards the end I couldn't be trusted to walk down the street, because I'd fall asleep while walking in the crosswalk.
OTOH, that was decades ago. Perhaps now it would produce hallucinations. More likely I just couldn't do it.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
With my tinnitus, not even that chamber is going to be "quiet."
And to think that when I was living in Minnesota back in the late 70s they'd charge $35 to float in a sensory deprivation tank for the better part of an afternoon. I mean they had an actual sensory dep salon in the Uptown area of Minneapolis just a few blocks from where I lived.
Seastead this.
Experienced this ( or something rather similar ) in a deep rock fissure in the Mauritanian Sahara. I had hiked through the desert for days, and finally found this place very, very far away from any human being. For five nights, I slept in there - that is: I tried. The silence drove me mad: I had to go outside to find sleep amid wind-generated, soft noise.
There is also the citation from Job, in the Bible, who has retired to a very lonely place to mourn: "The beatings of my heart subdue me with terror."
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
I'm really tired. I read "Quietest Place on Earth" and I immediately thought Disneyland. No wait, that's "happiest". Anyway, does Disneyland cause hallucinations? That's a whole different matter.
Not sure what the problem is. My ex has an implant. The external processor most certainly had an on/off switch.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
USA did it too. It was named project MkULTRA. And looking at prisonners with masks and headsets, I bet it is still used to day at gizmo.
People who are deaf don't suddenly start hearing their own beating heart in the chamber ... jeez.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Man I wish my natural hearing had an off switch sometimes ...
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I suspect you are correct. I used to be able to go without sleep for far longer than I can now, and the effects of staying awake longer seem more severe the older I get. On the other hand, I can't seem to stay asleep for ages and ages like I could when I was a teenager either.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Nice idea and I'd fully consider it. Heck, nowadays, I'd be able to hack my own system to flash LEDs, or similar. But this was nearly 30 years ago. Fortunately, in spite of my difficulties, he grew up without too many issues. I have a cochlear implant, now, and can hear him quite well.
I faked it through some early interviews like that. However, some people are easier to read than others. For example, my son and I can carry on a conversation, while running, with me not wearing my cochlear implant. He grew up having to speak so I could understand him, so even if I'm not wearing my CI, I get about 95% of what he says. In some cases, he'll speak without making noise so I can understand him without having other people in the room any the wiser. On the other hand, my wife is way more difficult to read. It's frustrating. Guys with beards? Forget it. Thankfully, I get pretty good coverage with my CI, so I don't have to depend so much on lip reading. With some people, I'll use both, just to be sure. And then, with a rare few, there's the classic, "I'm deaf, but I'm ignoring you, anyway."
Cochlear brand cochlear implants do have on/off switches. My early model, the one I got in 1997 and still use because the later models suck ass in terms of sound quality - sounds like they're not sampling fast enough; it's robotic, even after lots of tweaking - has a mode that attenuates constant noises such as road noise, loud conversations in crowded rooms, etc, but it's not that good. In those cases, I plug in an external mic that I give to the person to whom I want to listen, often my wife, so the sound is picked up mostly from a discrete point. It helps greatly.
On the other hand, and this will address MikeBabcock, below, as well, there are times when I take off my CI - like when exercising, where sweat might short things out, or sleeping, where it gets in the way - but I'm at the mercy of whatever I can see or feel, which is risky. In the event of a fire, I'd be toasted, if my wife was out of town and I was by myself. Sure, there are alarms that flash brightly, but I don't have those; I kind-of depend on my wife for that. I probably should get some. My alarm watch buzzes, which is great to tell me when it's time to get up, but not useful in terms of fire protection or intruder detection. When riding my bike, I don't hear cars coming from behind. I've had a few close calls, but have never been hit, fortunately. I have lost my grown son off the back and had to turn around to find him with a flat about a quarter mile back, which sucked. So, in general, unless I have to take it off, I wear it. Sometimes, like on an airplane, I'll just turn it down, or plug in my iPod, which cuts out everything else but my music. In department meetings, I'd plug in and no one would know I wasn't paying attention to the PHB, unless I was obviously jammin' away. That was an enjoyable bonus. Except for those times when people would talk to me, and I didn't even know it until they tapped me. Oops.
People such as the monk Tenzin Wangyal from Tibet who follow the Bon Tradition and practice the Dzogchen Meditation will be capable of breaking the existing record of 45 minutes in this chamber and could stay in there more than a day. This practice is far older than budhism.
Articles about this room pop up all of the time, it's not news unless it's new. There's nothing new here except they leave out that people have spent hours in there.
Wish I had mod points for this. Exactly right. Which makes me think that $100/15 minute stints in this room wouldn't be bad at all.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Amen to this. I'm lucky, I'm only deaf in one ear, so it's more of an annoyance than a real problem for me.
I miss music in stereo.
...what'll it do if I already hallucinate every day? I'm hallucinating that I'm locked in my closet with Alyssa Milano right now!
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