The sound of silence

It is a testament to how good the design is, that all major groups of vertebrates share our five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. From the fish to the mammals, also amphibians, reptiles and bird have the same senses with just a few exceptions and specializations: underground animals, like moles and bats do not have much use for the sight, so it has become vestigial, and nocturnal animals also have differences in the way they see, but all in all the solution seems to have worked pretty well for more than 500 million years, since the Cambrian Explosion gave origin to the vertebrates. 

The hearing is a perfect complement to the sight, because is it always active (you can close your eyes, but you cannot close your ears), involuntary and omni-directional (you can choose in which direction you look, but you hear in all directions), so it help us being aware of our surroundings whenever our sight is focused on a given task. However, noise in modern societies is becoming a battleground: on the one hand, there are activities which are intrinsically noisy, so the fact that we cannot shut our ears means that our capacity to be disturbed by someone else is enormous, particularly living in close quarters as is the case in cities; on the other, the tolerance level for each person are different, and with a noise that awakes someone, the neighbor might just sleep through.

Photo: Susan Cipriano on Pixabay

One of the most salient examples of this trend is the open-plan office: even if the typewrites have been mostly relegated to museums and printing factories, the constant babble of phone conversations, the ceaseless clicking of computer keyboards and mice and the relentless fans of computers, copiers and air conditioning devices can transform an environment intended for productive creation into a true cacophony. The removal of physical obstacles, although aimed at increasing the interaction between the workers, has also added to the noise level, to the point that in many offices most workers strive to isolate themselves by using noise-cancelling headphones and replacing the phone ring with a light signal. Arguably, the office environment is relatively safe, where life-threatening dangers are to be expected, and even in the case of an evacuation, the acoustic alarms should be able to get through the headphones.

The trend becomes a problem when this practice is extended to other circumstances where there are real dangers. The constant need to turn every single waking minute into something productive has pushed many people into making profitable use of the auditory channel in situations where it is allegedly idle, by listening to music, the news or any one of the myriad of podcasts published daily. One of the lesser examples of this problem is the person sitting next to you in the bus who, abstracted is blaring music they are listening to, does not realize how far down the route the bus is and neither do they hear the PA announcements, so when the bus arrives at their stop they suddenly jump into action, stepping on your toes, stumbling on an old lady and almost running over a visually impaired man on his way out. But the really troubling situation is that of the runners and bikers that dive into the traffic while wearing a pair of headphones that block any outside noise, so that they are completely unaware of the cars or other bicycles around them, eventually causing an increasing number of accidents.

In the meantime, more and more people are turning to Buddhist meditation, mindfulness and other activities to try to quiet their internal noise. However, both the constant bombardment and the search for internal silence lead to the same surprising result of isolation. This was already a problem back in 1965, when Simon & Garfunkel published "The Sound of Silence", and the arrival of the internet has only made the situation worse because the production of content has simply exploded, and the compulsion to ingest this endless inflow is killing other forms of communication, in particular bi-lateral ones, where both partners contribute to the conversation, replaced by a sharp division between the producers, which never cease to speak, and the consumer, who guzzle their production virtually mindlessly.

So next time to meet a friend, just let the cellphone be and devote a few minutes of undivided attention to them. And if there is nothing to discuss (which I doubt) you can always enjoy together the sound of silence. Enjoy the evening.