Scientists Confirm You Can Actually Hear Silence
Paul Simon convinced the world that silence has a particular and haunting sound decades ago, and it seems that science is finally catching up.
A new paper written by philosophers and psychologists at Johns Hopkins University claims they’ve found evidence that you can, in fact, “hear” silence.
“We typically think of our sense of hearing as being concerned with sounds. But silence, whatever it is, is not a sound – it’s the absence of a sound. Surprisingly, what our work suggests is that nothing is also something you can hear.”
For the study, researchers utilized auditory tricks like the one-is-more illusion and added a twist: they occasionally subbed noise for nothingness.
When those swaps happened, the participants brains reacted the same way they would to sound illusions.
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Study co-author Chaz Firestone spoke about how he believes he proved the answer to this age-old question.
“Philosophers have long debated whether silence is something we can literally perceive, but there hasn’t been a scientific study aimed directly at this question. Or approach was to ask whether our brains treat silences the way they treat sounds. If you can get the same illusions with silences as you get with sounds, then that may be evidence that we literally hear silence after all.”
The study included 1000 participants who took seven different tests – all of which gave the same results.
“We show that silences can ‘substitute’ for sounds in event-based auditory illusions. Seven experiments introduce three ‘silence illusions,’ adapted from perceptual illusions previously thought to arise only with sounds.”
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And yes, the results really were total.
“In all cases, silence elicited temporal distortions perfectly analogous to their sound-based counterparts, suggesting that auditory processing treats moments of silence the way it treats sounds. Silence is truly perceived, not merely inferred.”
The scientists seem pretty proud of their results here, and it is nice to know.
But I mean. The rest of us have accepted the idea long ago, thanks to Paul and Art.
