Eliminating Our Primal Fear of Silence
I’m going to make an obvious statement to open this piece — we live in a society devoid of silence. If that statement doesn’t seem obvious, look around you and try to describe all the sensations, sites, smells, and sounds. Furthermore, try to do it without looking at a screen. It’s an overwhelming exercise that illustrates not just its lack of presence, but our fear of silence.
The Origins of our Fear
But from where does this fear originate? Conceptually, this fear stems from two sources. The first, biological source is our social nature. Sound has been a primary form of communication for humans and primates since our species’ origin. Therefore, the absence of it is a signal of danger or social rejection.
The second, environmental source is the unnatural presence of silence. For most of our species’ history, nature provided plenty of external auditory and non-auditory stimulus to inform us of our environment. Couple this precedent to a brain who’s constantly seeking external stimuli, and, again, there is great discomfort.
Fear of Silence in Modern Society
Knowing these two inherent oppositions to silence, it doesn’t take much to infer why in a modern, noisy, technology-based society the absence of external stimulus is even more unsettling. However, just because constant stimulus is normal doesn’t mean it’s healthy. Several studies in the past decade have correlated continuous exposure to high stimulation environments to increased levels of stress-related diseases.
When our brain receives any form of external stimulation, it processes it to determine if our environment is safe or unsafe. It’s also important to recognize that it processes exponentially more external inputs than we consciously observe. For that reason, the parasympathetic nervous system exists.
The Parasympathetic Nervous System
The parasympathetic nervous system is how our brain connects to other parts of the body. It’s why you feel “butterflies in your stomach” when you’re nervous or why you detect an unsafe situation before you formulate an explanation as to why it’s unsafe. The primary channel for this feedback system is the Vagus Nerve.
In layman’s terms, the Vagus Nerve is your body’s emergency alert system. It, like the digital system, also has multiple levels. The first level of vagal response is safety, which indicates your environment presents no harm. The second level is “fight or flight”, which indicates there’s environmental danger and you must prepare to react. The final level is “life threatening”, also referred to as “freeze mode”. In this most severe level, all your body’s available oxygen is rerouted to your brain to preserve your body’s critical functions.
Again, in modern society, these three levels correspond to different situations than in prehistoric society. Specifically, modern situations are centered around man-made environments and social interactions. We might not be presented with the same degree of physical danger, but we’ve developed heightened sensitivity to psychological danger.
Benefits of Silence
This development towards psychological danger is where we begin to realize the benefits of silence. Apart from the reduced stress-induced hormone production, increased silence also induces neurogenesis — the creation of new neurons.
In 2013, Dr. Imke Kirste was studying the neurological impact of different noise levels on mice. Groups of mice were exposed to different noise levels for two hours per day for three days. The noise levels were ambient noise, Mozart, pup calls (screaming kids), and silence. What she found was seven days after the noise exposure, the only group of mice with BrdU-positive, or newly formed brain cells was the group exposed to complete silence.
Apart from neurogenesis, there are esoteric benefits to silence. As mentioned previously, our brains are constantly evaluating our environment to determine if it’s safe or unsafe. Taking that observation a step further, when the brain deems an environment safe, it lowers the activity of the areas associated with external input processing. That newly freed-up energy needs to be reallocated, and the only place it can be reallocated towards are our emotions and thoughts.
A Short Story of Silence
I’ll use a personal example to illustrate this reallocation process. Back in January, I was on a train from Frankfurt to Salzburg. It was the last few days of a two-week Europe trip which had been fantastic but exhausting. As expected, the exhaustion was due to the unfamiliarity of my environment. However, the train provided a temporary oasis.
It was clean, quiet, and scenic: the perfect place to allow my brain to process all the stimuli over the past ten days. The clarity of my thinking during those six hours was unbelievable. Complete ideas and thoughts appeared left and right, one of them was the topic for this piece. Now, as I sit here writing the conclusion, I’m appreciative of silence’s role in the creative process.
Incorporating Silence in the Modern World
I’m well aware achieving silence in modern society is difficult. For anybody who’s not a monk, complete silence is almost impossible. However, we can take incremental steps towards quieting our external world. The first part of this process involves broadening our definition of silence. Yes, absence of auditory noise is important, but so are cleanliness and stillness. Always keep in mind the less external input you’re exposed to, the easier it is to look internally.
Our internal world is the genesis of our greatest ideas. If we have any hope of leveraging it, we need to give it the respect and space it deserves. We can begin that process by incrementally quieting our external world. There are an infinite number of ways to do this, I’ll leave it up to you to decide which to do first.
Be More.
Become Polymathic.
Quote of the Week: “Nature abhors a vacuum.” — Aristotle
