Science Made This Chamber Silent, Your Mind Is What Makes It Terrifying

Jul 27, 2023

Quiet is calming, but there's something eerie about deafening silence.

On April 3, 2012, The Daily Mail brought widespread attention to Orfield Labs, an acoustics and architecture research lab that had just broken a Guinness World Record for constructing the world's quietest room—an anechoic chamber ("an" meaning "not," "echo" meaning "sound" or "echo") that registered at -9 decibels. With it, there was a bit of a challenge.

"The longest anyone can bear Earth's quietest place is 45 minutes," the Mail wrote. Shortly thereafter, the Mail said you'd start becoming disoriented from hearing your own body functions—the rush of blood in your veins, your lungs, head throbbing, and you would start hallucinating.

The possibility that you could start going crazy in silence and isolation isn't unfounded. Solitary confinement is already known to have horrific effects on animals and animals that need socialization. And being stuck with the noise of your thoughts and the visceral realization that you're a bag of meat running a lot of fine-tuned chemical processes shouldn't put anyone at ease. But I still didn't understand: why 45 minutes, and why did people really start running out?

To begin answering this, I went into Cooper Union's anechoic chamber in New York, perhaps the quietest place in all of Manhattan. It's the only anechoic chamber in the city, and because of how limited real estate is, it was small and unimpressive compared to the sort space agencies could afford.

The walls were lined with sound-dampening fiberglass wedges arranged in perpendicular tiles. I was standing on some metal grating above a floor covered with even more wedges. The effects were instantaneous. The air was still, and, lacking any surfaces that could reflect sound, voices were muffled. I had to lean in to hear acoustics professor Melody Baglione tell me how this worked. It was without a doubt, the closest I could get to silence in the city without dying or being sucked into a vacuum.

Cooper Union anechoic chamber. Photo: Clinton Nguyen

I asked to spend 45 minutes in the chamber—they closed the insulated door behind them. I unscrewed the lightbulb, plunging the room into a pitch blackness, to make the sensory deprivation total.

The first thing I noticed was that normally imperceptible sounds were loud and clear. Sounds like your joints creaking and neck craning became apparent, and your ears, not hearing any background noise, catches even slighter sounds. Your skin makes noise as it comes into contact with your clothes. Your blinking makes noise. These tinier sounds are being blown out by the hustle and bustle of everyday life as the Earth spins ever forward, but in the quiet and darkness, everything stops so you can just hear the bodily orchestra you're missing out on every waking moment.

If there's anything more silent than an engineered vacuum on Earth, it's an actual vacuum in space

I thought about why I wasn't afraid of the dark. It's probably because I knew people were outside waiting for me. I often took breaks and looked at my phone to check the time, because after a while the experience becomes lateral and more of the same. I could hear its faint humming and whirring and forgot that phones were physical circuitry and not just some abstract means to an end. In many ways it should have been meditative, but considering that reporters' minds are racing to twenty different things at once, it's easy for simple silence to get drowned out.

As thirty minutes rolled by, my ears were straining to hear anything except for my usually latent (but now very obvious) tinnitus. Usually low frequency background noise like a refrigerator humming or air currents would usually make the tinnitus melt away, but in the chamber, the shrill ringing in my ears wouldn't stop. Not even for a second. I knew I had tinnitus, but it hadn't been as bad as what I heard in the chamber—it was completely jarring.

I wasn't comfortable, but I made it out past 45 minutes without barreling out the door telling people I had started seeing things aside from the blood vessels in my eyes.

Some people aren't built to stick around in isolation and sensory deprivation chambers for that long. Even worse than tinnitus, the chamber feels claustrophobic. Steve Orfield, the owner of Orfield Labs, tells me that NASA sends astronauts over to their studios for training. If there's anything more silent than an engineered vacuum on Earth, it's an actual vacuum in space, and they'd need to prepare for that.

"You're sending someone into a situation where there is no recourse, then you have to send people who are extremely stable. So you're not likely to send wildly philosophical people into space. You're not likely to send existentially curious people into space," he told me.

I am all of these things.

"You're likely to send people into space who are focused, who can keep within a narrow range, who don't get anxious, who don't get depressed, who in general are much more stable than most of us," he said.

I didn't come out as freaked out and scarred as people make the trip out to be. But the experience was and still is jarring, but not horrifying. Some people find a sort of meditative niche in this soundless void.

Orfield, who has received numerous calls for the 45-minute rumor, mentioned that there was one time when a Navy vet who worked on an aircraft carrier rolled in and asked to stay in the anechoic chamber for an hour. It was because he kept hearing echoes of planes taking off and engines roaring.

Apparently, being in an almost perfectly quiet chamber fixed that.

But still, for many people, losing control of one or more of your senses would be an abject terror. To become blind or deaf would be an immense personal tragedy, but to want to deafen and blind yourself temporarily, well, that's something people sell Groupons for. Anechoic chambers may be a hyped-up horror, but I can't speak for everyone, especially people who could be more prone to anxiety and less comfortable with their bodies than I am.

And while intrigue may be front and foremost in those horror stories, but the plain reality is that the horror doesn't come from the chamber itself. It's all in your body, and your mind.

All in Your Head is a series that takes a scientific look at all things spooky and scary. Follow along here.

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