Thursday, November 24, 2022

45 minutes ...


The quietest place yours truly ever experienced was early morning Death Valley where I did hear my body percolate at grand scale as the air stood still and no wildlife moved about to break the silence. This happened many years ago, prior to the age of tinnitus and deafness "enjoyed" by this rube as we speak. When reading the NYTimes piece titled Can I Survive the 'Quietest Place on Earth'? longer than 45 minutes, considered to be the absolute limit one can tolerate being in the room before going crazy as bandied about by social media without the need to vet said statement, the answer is yes given the intense tinnitus nature has bestowed upon me 24/7 as said condition masks bodily burbles and noises to a large extent without question. 

It would be cool to experience this sense of total silence yet again as the time spent in Death Valley veered close to being mystical as the sound our bodies produce 24/7 is both remarkable and disconcerting at the same time. 

To whit.

In a leafy Minneapolis neighborhood under a thick cloak of ivy stands a modest concrete building. Contained within the building is silence exceeding the bounds of human perception. This hush is preserved in a small room, expensively engineered to be echoless. Certain people find the promise of such quiet irresistible; it entices them, like a soundless siren call, to visit the building at great personal cost. The room of containment, technically an “anechoic chamber,” is the quietest place on the planet — according to some. According to others, it’s more like the second-quietest. It is quieter than any place most people will ever go, unless they make a point of going to multiple anechoic chambers over the course of a lifetime.

What happens to people inside the windowless steel room is the subject of wild and terrible speculation. Public fascination with the room exploded 10 years ago, with an article on The Daily Mail’s website. “The Longest Anyone Can Bear Earth’s Quietest Place is 45 Minutes,” The Mail declared. The story left readers to extrapolate their own conclusions about why this was so from the short, haunting observations of the room’s soft-spoken proprietor, Steven J. Orfield, of Orfield Laboratories.

“You’ll hear your heart beating,” Orfield was quoted as saying. And: “In the anechoic chamber, you become the sound.” The experience was so “disconcerting,” The Daily Mail reported, that no one had ever “survived” a visit of longer than 45 minutes. In the decade since, the legend has been propagated, and sometimes further embellished with details about room-induced hallucinations, in outlets from Smithsonian Magazine (the official journal of the Smithsonian Institution) to UberFacts (an online trivia font with 13.6 million Twitter followers, no connection to the ride-sharing app and a tenuous one to facts).

Remember ...

The body is only totally still — totally silent — in death.

Happy T-Day. :)


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