Researchers have shown that people are able to hear the sound of silence.

Summary : Researchers have shown that people are able to hear the sound of silence. A group of philosophers and psychologists have discovered that silence can actually be heard and can affect how we perceive time using auditory tricks.

The discovery answers the question of whether people can hear things beyond just sounds, which has confused philosophers for a long time.

Source: Johns Hopkins University

Research and Discoveries

We usually think that our ability to hear is about the things we hear. “But silence is not a sound. It is when there is no sound,” said Rui Zhe Goh, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University studying philosophy and psychology. Our research shows that it is possible to hear something, even if it is nothing.

The team made changes to well-known tricks that make you think you hear things. Instead of hearing sounds, they replaced them with periods of no sound. For instance, one trick made a noise appear to be longer than it actually was. In the team’s new trick, where they use silence, a moment of silence also felt longer than it actually was.

The researchers said that since silence-based illusions had the same effects as sound-based ones, it implies that people perceive silence in the same way they perceive sounds.

Observation

Chaz Firestone, who works at Johns Hopkins as a professor in psychology and brain sciences, said that philosophers have been debating whether we can truly experience silence, but no scientific study has specifically investigated this question. We wanted to find out if our brains process silence in the same way as they process sounds. If we can experience the same things with silence as we do with sound, then it might mean that we really do hear silence.

Just like optical illusions can trick our eyes, auditory illusions can trick our ears. They can make us feel like periods of time are longer or shorter than they really are. One example is when one long beep seems longer than two short beeps together, even though they are the same length.

In a study with 1,000 participants, the scientists modified the sounds in the one-is-more illusion by introducing moments of no sound. They called this new illusion the one-silence-is-more illusion. They discovered that people assumed a single moment of silence lasted longer than two brief moments of silence. Other things that make it seem silent had the same results as things that make it sound different.

People were told to listen to sound recordings that sounded like busy places such as restaurants, markets, and train stations. After that, they listened carefully for times in those audio tracks when all sound abruptly stopped, creating short moments of silence. The researchers said that these pauses didn’t just make people feel like they were seeing things that weren’t there. Scientists discovered that the tricks of the mind that they believed could only be caused by sounds also worked when there was no sound at all.

Conclusion

“There is something we perceive that is not a sound, and it is the absence of sound when it disappears,” explained Ian Phillips, a co-author of the study and a professor of Philosophy and Psychological and Brain Sciences. The types of tricks and things that seem like they only happen when we hear sounds also happen in silence, meaning we can hear when there is no sound.

The team said that they have found a new method to study how people perceive when something is missing.

The researchers want to continue studying how well people can hear silence, including if we can hear silence without any sound before it. They also want to study situations when things disappear visually and when people think something is missing.