The Quietest Place on Earth Will Drive You Insane Within 45 Minutes

This Gizmodo story makes a nice follow up to saturday’s prose poem. Maybe that wasn’t fiction after all?

There’s a small room in Minnesota that blocks out 99% of all external sound. That’s an impressive number! Also impressive: nobody can take more than 45 minutes alone in the room before they go nuts.

The Daily Mail describes Orfield Labs’ anechoic chamber—perfect for making extremely sensitive audio measurements. But also perfect for sending you into a hallucinatory hell so hellacious you’ll need a chair:

 

‘When it’s quiet, ears will adapt. The quieter the room, the more things you hear. You’ll hear your heart beating, sometimes you can hear your lungs, hear your stomach gurgling loudly. ‘In the anechoic chamber, you become the sound.’ And this is a very disorientating experience. Mr Orfield explained that it’s so disconcerting that sitting down is a must. He said: ‘How you orient yourself is through sounds you hear when you walk. In the anechnoic chamber, you don’t have any cues. You take away the perceptual cues that allow you to balance and manoeuvre. If you’re in there for half an hour, you have to be in a chair.’

 

via The Quietest Place on Earth Will Drive You Insane Within 45 Minutes.

 

About caspar

Caspar is just one monkey among billions. Battering his keyboard without expectations even of peanuts, let alone of aping the Immortal Bard. By day he is an infantologist at Birkbeck Babylab, by night he runs BabyLaughter.net
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