Slashdot Mirror
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'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!
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.
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.
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
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
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.
But can we really call a place where sound doesn't exist "quiet".
Yes, "quiet" is defined as the absence of sound without specification of the reason for its absence. If not we will need a new word to describe the "quiet due to the absence of anything to vibrate"-ness of space.
In the same way we can't call vacuum "cold" because there is no temperature.
That's not actually correct - we can measure the temperature of a vacuum from the blackbody radiation spectrum it contains. For example deep space, away from any nearby heat source like a star, has a temperature of 2.7K due to the cosmic microwave background radiation.
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.