In short
Episode 3 of The Sound Barrier asks what silence “sounds like” and whether silence is truly nothing.
Guest
Erin Westgate, researcher who studied well-being and then tested whether people prefer horrible sounds (vomiting, nails-on-chalkboard, glass breaking) or even electric shocks over 15 minutes of silence; about half chose shocks and many disliked silence.
Key claims
people experience silence as uncomfortable and anxiety-inducing, yet sensory deprivation can reduce anxiety/PTSD; mice exposed to silence showed increased neuron growth.
Guest
Rayja Goh, Johns Hopkins PhD student in psychology/philosophy, who tests a “one is more illusion” variant using restaurant ambient noise and headphone trials; many report one longer silence than two shorter silences of equal duration, implying the brain “edits” silence like sound.
Notable examples
anechoic chamber experience (thick silence, hearing breathing/heartbeat) and John Cage’s 4’33” demonstrating “no such thing as silence.”
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOErin Westgate's Silence Experiment
1:30 to 3:47
Erin Westgate's study reveals people's aversion to silence, even preferring pain over it.
“You know, people always say, oh my goodness, I'm so busy.”
The Dual Nature of Silence
3:47 to 4:19
Exploring how silence can be both uncomfortable and beneficial for mental health.
“and their brains actually got new neurons.”
Rayja Goh's Symphony Experience
4:19 to 6:06
Rayja Goh reflects on his profound experience of silence during a symphony.
“So, one of the most striking experiences of silence I've felt was like when I was at a symphony.”
The One Is More Illusion
6:06 to 7:54
Understanding auditory perception through the One Is More illusion experiment.
“Something called the one is more illusion.”
Experimenting with Silence
7:54 to 11:37
Reja tests if silences can create an auditory illusion similar to sounds.
“If you look at the sound waves that enter our ears and you visualize it on the screen, it's going to be a bit of a mess.”
Experimenting with Silence
12:43 to 13:56
Reja tests if silences can create an auditory illusion similar to sounds.
“The other day I was out shopping, picked up a cute dress, but I wasn't totally sure it was my style because I've been kind of moving away from sleeveless stuff lately.”
Experimenting with Silence
14:03 to 14:15
Reja tests if silences can create an auditory illusion similar to sounds.
“So that is q-u-i-n-c-e dot com slash unexplainable for free shipping and 365 day returns.”
Exploring the Anechoic Chamber
14:52 to 17:48
Experience the unique sound environment of an anechoic chamber.
“A couple months ago, I hopped on the subway, and I headed to Cooper Union, this tiny private college in Manhattan, to talk with a wonderfully named expert on sound.”
The Effects of Absolute Silence
17:48 to 19:58
Understand the psychological effects of extreme quiet.
“To be honest, it's hard to describe how surreal this all felt.”
John Cage and the Concept of Silence
19:58 to 24:40
Explore John Cage's philosophies on silence and sound.
“If you stop the sounds from the outside, then what you hear are the sounds that are coming from the inside.”
Show all 13 chapters
The Value of Silence
24:40 to 25:59
Reflect on the various types and values of silence in our lives.
“There's a texture, almost like the particles of air in a room that seems empty.”
Listening to Silence
25:59 to 27:08
Encourage mindfulness through listening to silence.
“In the last couple weeks, I've started thinking about silence as turning up the volume knob on my perception.”
Reflection on Silence and Upcoming Episode
28:00 to 32:01
Listeners are invited to share their experiences with silence and learn about the next episode's focus on a blind astronomer.
“We'd love to know what you thought of when you were listening to your own silence.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Erin Westgate:We all do it. You have a night for yourself but don't like the sound of the silence, so you turn on the TV just for the ambience. It's a little trick that helps you feel like you've got company and aren't alone. And other insurers, well, they may make you feel alone. But when you switch to GEICO, you've got claims reps available around the clock. So whenever you need, you'll have people around to help. And let's turn on the washing machine, just for good measure. Isn't that soothing? It feels good to have support.
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1:09Melody Baglione:Erin Westgate used to be an optimist.
1:12Erin Westgate:When I was in graduate school, we were working on this question of how we could develop well-being interventions to actually make people's lives happier. And we had this idea that if we just put people in an empty room by themselves and just gave them a few minutes to be alone with their own thoughts, that they'd really enjoy it. You know, people always say, oh my goodness, I'm so busy. I wish I just had a few minutes to sit down and think.
1:39Melody Baglione:So Erin recruited a whole bunch of people, and she had them each spend 15 minutes in an empty room in total silence.
1:47Erin Westgate:And most people didn't enjoy it very much. They said things like brushing their teeth was better.
1:54Melody Baglione:They hated it. So she decided to flip the whole study on its head. Instead of trying to help people feel better, she was going to try and see how bad she could make them feel by giving them the option to listen to horrible sounds instead.
2:10Erin Westgate:So like someone throwing up, nails on a chalkboard, glass breaking. And sure enough, yeah, people would rather listen to sounds of people vomiting, nails on a chalkboard, etc., rather than simply sit in silence.
2:27Melody Baglione:At this point, Erin was just morbidly curious. Did people hate silence so much that they'd actually prefer pain? Like, what if she put people in an ankle cuff and gave them the option to shock themselves?
2:42Erin Westgate:It is not pleasant. It hurts a little bit. I always liken it to the feeling of, like, a cat sort of jumping out and scratching you. It's sort of like, ah, you know, shocking. but it's not actually harmful. And so we set this hall up and we just sort of waited. And the first few participants, we just sort of were like, are they going to do it? Are they actually going to shock themselves? But we saw very early on that people were indeed shocking themselves. Yeah, I know. So it's like, why would you do that?
3:15Melody Baglione:Almost half the participants gave themselves an electric shock. They couldn't even make it 15 minutes.
3:21Erin Westgate:people actually do something that's painful rather than simply sit in silence.
3:27Melody Baglione:The more you think about it, silence is a really strange thing. On the one hand, it's so uncomfortable that people would rather shock themselves than sit through it. At the same time, silence and other forms of sensory deprivation, they've been shown to reduce anxiety and PTSD. There's this one experiment I love where mice were exposed to silence and their brains actually got new neurons. Like, more neurons than when they were exposed to any other sounds. Just from listening to silence.
4:07Melody Baglione:I'm Noam Hassenfeld, and this is episode three of The Sound Barrier, a series from Unexplainable about the limits of hearing and the ways we can break through. Today on the show, how can something that's nothing do so much?
4:53Rui Zhe Goh:So, one of the most striking experiences of silence I've felt was like when I was at a symphony. And the symphony was working up to a kind of crescendo. And like right when it hit the crescendo, it ended. And the moment before the applause, it was just kind of like hit by this experience. And I definitely felt silence like… hit me across the face.
5:18Melody Baglione:Rayja Goh is a PhD student at Johns Hopkins. He studies psychology and philosophy. And that experience that he had at the symphony, it left him with some pretty basic questions. He'd figured silence was just nothing, like the absence of sound. But he'd felt it. So the question was, what was he feeling?
5:40Rui Zhe Goh:So actually, there's a philosophical literature around this. Some people argue that there is a genuine experience of silence, right? So there's something it's like to experience silence. Whereas other people argue that silence is just the absence of experience.
5:53Melody Baglione:It sounds like one of those classic bong rip dorm room questions. Like, what is silence? But Reija wanted an actual answer, which would mean he'd have to do an experiment.
6:05Rui Zhe Goh:So at that point when I was thinking of the experiment, I was actually kind of fascinated by this illusion.
6:11Melody Baglione:Something called the one is more illusion.
6:13Rui Zhe Goh:And you'll see in a moment why it's called the one is more illusion. Okay. Suppose I play you two sounds, right? I play you boop, boop. And then I play you a single sound. Boop. The two sounds and the single sound take up the exact same amount of time, but you will hear the single sound is longer.
6:31Melody Baglione:That's why it's called the one is more illusion. One sound seems longer than two.
6:36Rui Zhe Goh:Yeah. And one of the great things about auditory illusions is that you can experience it for yourself.
6:39Melody Baglione:Is there a website I can go to now to check it out? Sure.
6:42Rui Zhe Goh:Let me just send it to you.
6:46Melody Baglione:Okay.
6:48Erin Westgate:One.
6:52Two.
6:55Melody Baglione:Oh, that sounded way longer.
6:57Rui Zhe Goh:Right, right. It's exactly the same length.
6:59Melody Baglione:That didn't even sound close.
7:01Rui Zhe Goh:Exactly. Exactly.
7:10Melody Baglione:Audio illusions like this one are great ways to learn about how our brain processes sound. They seem like glitches, but they really just show us how our brain is constantly editing the world we hear. Like when we're in a room and our voice is bouncing off all the walls and hitting our ears at slightly different times, the brain cancels out the echoes so that we only hear a single voice. When there are sounds that are muffled or distorted, the brain can fill them in without us noticing. For some people, with a cochlear implant, the brain can recreate almost the entire world they hear. And scientists think this particular glitch, the one is more illusion, it tells us something pretty fundamental about how our hearing works.
7:57Rui Zhe Goh:If you look at the sound waves that enter our ears and you visualize it on the screen, it's going to be a bit of a mess.
8:02Melody Baglione:Think about what a waveform looks like. It's just a blobby thing. But the world doesn't sound like a blobby thing. We hear different individual sounds.
8:15Rui Zhe Goh:If you're at a park and you're talking to a friend and you hear a dog barking in the background, you don't hear a continuous jumble of noise. You hear discrete words.
8:24Melody Baglione:This is the big insight from the One Is More illusion. Our brain is always on the lookout for discrete sounds. It's why we're able to pull out individual sounds from a noisy background. And it's why the one boop sounds longer than the two boops. But Reja wanted to see if our brain would do the same thing to silence.
8:45Rui Zhe Goh:My idea was to try to create a silence version of this auditory illusion.
8:50Melody Baglione:Reja replaced the boop boop with silence silence. His idea was that if these silences caused the same glitch, it would show that our brain is processing silences just like it processes sounds. That in a pretty literal sense, we're hearing silence.
Read the full transcript
9:07Rui Zhe Goh:So what we did was in our experiments, our subjects had to wear headphones and we immersed our subjects in the ambient noise of a restaurant. There would be people talking, plates clinking, people walking around. And then when the trial starts, they would hear a sequence of two silences and then a one-silence sequence. and subjects that just asked, which one was longer? Was the one silence longer or was the two silence longer?
9:30Melody Baglione:And you have an example of this too, right?
9:32Rui Zhe Goh:Yeah, I think if you play that, you should be able to hear it.
9:36Melody Baglione:So I'm in the restaurant.
9:44Melody Baglione:Yeah,
9:50Melody Baglione:that's nuts. Okay, that's... Again, that just felt...
9:54Rui Zhe Goh:It's good, right?
9:54Melody Baglione:It's the same exact feeling. like the single silence feels way longer than the other two, which is basically the same thing as those notes.
10:00Rui Zhe Goh:Yeah, yeah. So, like, it does definitely feel like it's exactly the same thing happening.
10:05Melody Baglione:This one might be a little bit harder to hear the first time through, so I just want to play it one more time. Notice how much longer the uninterrupted silence feels compared to the two short ones, even though they're the same amount of time. One.
10:24Two.
10:29Rui Zhe Goh:And when we ran this experiment with subjects, we actually found the exact same proportion of subjects felt that one silence sequences are longer than the two silences sequence. So it definitely does seem like exactly the same mechanism as I play.
10:41Melody Baglione:Wow. And did you try this illusion on yourself? Did it work for you?
10:44Rui Zhe Goh:It definitely did work for me. When I created this illusion and played it to myself for the first time, I was like, wow, it works.
10:53Melody Baglione:Our brain isn't just editing sounds. It's editing silence.
10:57Rui Zhe Goh:Silence is not something out there in the world, and yet we can have an experience of it.
11:01Melody Baglione:I mean, your results seem to say that we are hearing the silence. We're not just not hearing anything.
11:08Rui Zhe Goh:Yeah, it tells us that the auditory system treats silences the same way as it treats sounds.
11:16Melody Baglione:So if silence is a real thing we can hear, what does it sound like?
11:26Melody Baglione:To find out, I decided to go to one of the quietest places on Earth. Loud noises! That's in a minute.
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12:51Erin Westgate:Support for the show comes from Quince. The other day I was out shopping, picked up a cute dress, but I wasn't totally sure it was my style because I've been kind of moving away from sleeveless stuff lately. Then I brought it home and tried it on over a little lightweight black T-shirt that I got from Quince. And I am literally wearing the whole outfit right now as I record this ad. The shirt from Quince was just the perfect thing to pair with the dress to give it sleeves. And the shirt is light and breathable enough that I'm not like sitting in the studio too warm. So as a person who loves to layer clothing, I really, really appreciate that Quince has a wide array of shirts and a whole bunch of different cuts.
13:38Erin Westgate:Lots of options for people like me. But if you are looking for not just shirts, but a whole range of lighter, cooler wardrobe pieces as part of a summer refresh, Quince also has you covered. Quince can help you find some new, breathable outfits that are easy to wear and still look put together. Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quince.com slash unexplainable for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. now available in Canada too. So that is q-u-i-n-c-e dot com slash unexplainable for free shipping and 365 day returns. quince dot com slash unexplainable. When I got a new car, I thought my insurance premium would increase and empty my bank account.
14:23Erin Westgate:Like if a tween won the lottery. I've invested most of my winnings in chicken tenders because they're bomb. But bro, I bought a house and it's sick, bro. I'm thinking the floor is going to be all trampoline, bro. With the helipad on the roof. The contractor said it's structurally unsound. They're just being babies. But switching to Geico saved me hundreds, so my bank account is safe.
14:43Melody Baglione:It feels good to save some hard-earned cash. It feels good to Geico.
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15:00Melody Baglione:A couple months ago, I hopped on the subway, and I headed to Cooper Union, this tiny private college in Manhattan, to talk with a wonderfully named expert on sound. Hello. Hi. Melody Baglione.
15:16Erin Westgate:Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Cooper Union.
15:18Melody Baglione:Can you just tell me a little bit about where we are right now?
15:21Erin Westgate:So we're in the Vibration and Acoustics Laboratory, and we also have the only anechoic chamber in New York City.
15:32Melody Baglione:An anechoic chamber is designed to be absurdly quiet. It's got double doors. It's got padding all over the walls. It's this place where you're supposed to be able to get as close to complete silence as possible. And anechoic chambers, they're pretty weird. There are all these stories about what they'll do to you if you spend too much time in there. Stories of people feeling nauseous or starting to hallucinate. Or this one violinist who apparently started pounding on the door immediately to get out. It's not exactly clear how much these are urban legends and how much of them are actual, real events.
16:09Melody Baglione:But it isn't hard to find all kinds of people who've heard these stories and then wrote articles or made videos being like, I survived the quietest room on Earth. It's a whole thing.
16:20Erin Westgate:You know, I've never done really studies to show you can spend this much time here before you go crazy because I'm always so busy that I don't have time to sit there. But there are many people that are interested in that question, and I'm asked that a lot. But I haven't done it myself.
16:37Melody Baglione:Can we go inside?
16:38Erin Westgate:Sure. All right.
16:45Melody Baglione:As soon as I walk into the chamber, my ears feel different. Okay, that feels really, really weird. The only word I can think of to describe the silence is thick. Like I'm wading into Jell-O or something. And the whole place is covered with these wedges.
17:04Erin Westgate:So you don't want to touch these wedges because they're fiberglass.
17:07Melody Baglione:They're on the walls. They're covering the door. They're on the ceiling. They're even on the floor. I'm actually standing on a catwalk suspended from the wall so we don't touch the fiberglass floor wedges. And those wedges are what make the room sound so weird. When you're in a normal room, your voice is bouncing off all the walls and the ceiling and the floor. You're hearing your voice come out of your mouth, but you're also hearing it reflected off all the other walls and then hitting your ear. That's how we're used to hearing sounds. But in an anechoic chamber, the wedges absorb so much of the sound that there aren't echoes.
17:44Melody Baglione:That's why it's called anechoic, as in without echo. And it sounds really strange. Hello! I'm screaming in a room! And it's really quiet! That's really weird. That's so weird. To be honest, it's hard to describe how surreal this all felt. It was almost like yelling into a black hole, like the sound was being sucked into nothingness. The weirdness doesn't exactly translate on a mic, but here's what it sounded like outside the chamber. And here's what it sounded like inside.
18:25Melody Baglione:But the longer I stayed there, the more my ears started to adapt to the silence, just like your eyes might adapt slowly in a dark room. It's extremely, extremely quiet in here. And after a couple minutes, I started hearing things. Every noise felt like the volume was just jacked up. My own breathing started to feel loud. I heard my own heartbeat. I feel like I can hear noises from my own head. And I can't tell if I'm making them up or not. Like there's this high pitch. There's this kind of swirling.
19:07Melody Baglione:Almost like I'm putting like a seashell up to my ear, but like reverse. Does that make any sense? Like reverse seashell.
19:18Melody Baglione:That was just 20 minutes in. As my head was swirling in the chamber, I was thinking about this story of one of my favorite composers, John Cage, who also once visited an anechoic chamber on his own quest for complete silence.
19:34Erin Westgate:I heard in that room two sounds. One was high and one was low. And I thought there was something wrong with the room.
19:44Melody Baglione:Cage went outside and he described the sounds to the engineer who told him that the higher sound was his nervous system and the lower sound was his circulatory system. There's no way to stop the reception of sound.
19:58Erin Westgate:If you stop the sounds from the outside, then what you hear are the sounds that are coming from the inside.
20:10Melody Baglione:And now, a performance of John Cage's 433. If you've ever heard of John Cage, it's probably because of this piece, 433. Please welcome our soloist, William Marks.
20:29Melody Baglione:in one recording i found an older man walks out onto the stage wearing a tux with tails and a white bow tie he sits down at the piano puts on his reading glasses and then he closes the part of the piano that covers the keys he picks up a stopwatch and holds it up with this kind of conductor-style flourish, presses go, and just sits there for four minutes and 33 seconds.
21:13Melody Baglione:Cage wrote 433 back in the 50s, but it still goes viral all the time. Like, this particular performance has almost 10 million views on YouTube. And, yeah, it might be because people think it's some kind of stunt. And the comments are kind of hilarious. Like, I once didn't speak for five minutes and this guy sued me for copyright. Or, I set this song as my ringtone and nobody called me. And I felt the same way when I first heard it. I was in a music class in college, and my professor told us we were going to perform it in class. So we pulled up the sheet music. It's basically a whole bunch of nothing divided into three movements of nothing.
22:01Melody Baglione:And my professor signaled us to start.
22:07Melody Baglione:For a moment, it was silent.
22:13Melody Baglione:And then I started to notice little things Like a cough A chair creaking when someone adjusted their position This low murmur of voices coming from the hallway outside My own breath
22:30Melody Baglione:And because I had the sheet music in front of me I started hearing all these noises Almost like they were intentional I heard them interacting I heard them layering on top of each other. I heard them getting louder and softer. And I started imagining them as if someone had composed them, you know, written them like notes into the sheet music. Notes that would be different wherever 433 gets performed.
22:57Erin Westgate:The first performance, you could hear the breeze in the trees. And then miraculously, when the second movement began, there were drops of rain that you could hear coming on the roof. And you know what happened in the third movement? People began talking because they realized that David Tudor wasn't going to make any sounds. So the sound of people talking was in the third movement.
23:24Melody Baglione:Cage was okay with people laughing sometimes. He had a sense of humor. But 433 wasn't a joke. And I do hope that at least some of the people behind those 10 million views on YouTube understood what Cage was doing here. He was reframing what silence is and what it can be.
23:44Erin Westgate:It doesn't matter where you are, whether you're in an anechoic chamber or outdoors on the street. There always are sounds to hear. There is no such thing as silence.
23:59Melody Baglione:This is where we finally get back to that original mystery from the electric shock experiment. Erin, the researcher behind the study, she says when she told people not to pay attention to anything around them and just focus on their own thoughts, they spun out pretty quickly.
24:15Erin Westgate:People's, I don't think their goal is to fill it with anxiety, but it's actually a giant, you know, stress induction.
24:21Melody Baglione:When people thought of silence as just this empty box, they filled it with their own anxieties. But silence isn't empty. Rage's experiment tells us silence is something we can hear. And Cage's piece shows us what it sounds like. It's not nothingness. It's full of noise. There's a texture, almost like the particles of air in a room that seems empty.
24:48Rui Zhe Goh:There can be beautiful silences. There can be awkward silences. There can be really powerful silences. I think often an effective speaker makes powerful uses of silence, right? When they pause, you kind of feel the weight of their words.
25:03Melody Baglione:Silence is something worth paying attention to on its own terms.
25:08Erin Westgate:Silence itself is a state of experiencing the world, you know, in the same way that what is the value in the Grand Canyon? Or what is the value in Mount Everest? Like, the value is that they're there. And so I think that when we think about things like the value of silence or the value of boredom or the value of grief, they're beautiful in their own right. And part of the wonder of being human is being able to experience them and appreciate them.
25:39Melody Baglione:And sometimes you get a clock chiming right through.
25:42Erin Westgate:Yes. This is what happens when you inherit your grandparents' grandfather clock after they die and then actually hang it up and let it do its thing.
25:59Melody Baglione:In the last couple weeks, I've started thinking about silence as turning up the volume knob on my perception. Like, right now, I'm speaking in a soundproof room. It's pretty quiet. It's pretty still. But wherever you're listening, it sounds different. You're hearing my voice, but you're also hearing the ambient sound of wherever you are. Maybe it's a light echo in your room, or the idling traffic as you cross the street, or the tiny buzz from a fluorescent light. So, I don't know. Maybe this is weird. But what if we just spend a little time in that silence? you're going to have your own particular kind of silence with its own particular small noises i'm going to have mine but yeah let's uh let's listen to the silence and see what we can hear
27:08I don't know.
27:44Thank you.
28:11Thank you.
28:39Thank you.
29:10Thank you.
29:54Not right now.
30:10Thank you.
30:42Thank you.
31:11Thank you.
31:38Melody Baglione:series, The Sound Barrier. We'd love to know what you thought of when you were listening to your own silence. What did it sound like? What did you hear? Or if you want to record a voice memo of silence wherever you are and email it to us at unexplainableatvox.com, we'd love to hear it too. On the next episode of The Sound Barrier, how a blind astronomer learned to listen to space.
32:01Erin Westgate:I thought those sounds were bothersome and ugly. And at that moment, everything transformed into beauty.
32:10Melody Baglione:That's next time. As for this episode, it was reported and produced by me, Noam Hassenfeld. I also wrote the music. It was edited by Joanna Salataroff with help from Jorge Just. Mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala. Fact-checking from Melissa Hirsch. And silent support from Sally Helm. Meredith Hodnot runs the show. Julia Longoria is our editorial director. And Burt Pinkerton ran towards the wooden carriage as the octopus army stampeded onto the runway. She hoisted the doctopus onto her shoulders, and she turned to face the chaos.
32:48Melody Baglione:Thanks to Vartika Sharma and Paige Vickers for the beautiful artwork for the Sound Barrier series. Thanks to Robert Liu. Thanks, as always, to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show along with me and Burt. And if any of you out there have thoughts about the show, send us an email. We're at unexplainable at vox.com. You can also leave us a review or a rating wherever you listen. Really helps us out. And if you're really into supporting the show and all of Vox in general, join our membership program. You can go to vox.com slash members to sign up. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back with the final episode of The Sound Barrier on Wednesday.
33:56Erin Westgate:Transcription by CastingWords to save.
33:58Melody Baglione:It feels good to save some hard-earned cash. It feels good to Geico.
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34:10Melody Baglione:Our brand new movie, Voicemails for Isabel, is all about those little moments that feel like the universe is looking out.
34:16Erin Westgate:Feeling homesick, then your sister calls.
34:18Melody Baglione:Hearing that perfect song exactly when you need it. Please stay. Sometimes life rigs things in our favor, like learning about your new favorite rom-com voicemails for Isabel, now playing only on Netflix.
From the publisher
A scientist asked people to sit in a silent room for 15 minutes. Almost half of them decided to give themselves a painful electric shock instead. What is it about our brains that makes our relationship with silence so strange? And should we learn how to listen to it?
This is the third episode of our new four-part series, The Sound Barrier.
Guests: Erin Westgate, assistant professor at the University of Florida; Rui Zhe Goh, doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University; Melody Baglione, professor at Cooper Union
For show transcripts, go to vox.com/unxtranscripts
For more, go to vox.com/unexplainable
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