Is it possible to hear the silence? A recent study shows that yes

The expression “deafening silence” could stop being an oxymoron, because according to a new study silence is something that is literally heard and has been determined with delusions hearing that reveal how the moments of silence They distort our perception of time.

Normally we think that our sense of hearing is related to sounds, but silence, whatever it is, is not a sound, it is the absence of it, recalled Rui Zhe Goh, from Johns Hopkins University and one of the signatories of the research published by Pnas.

“Surprisingly, what our work suggests is that nothing is also something that can be heard”he stressed.

The team, bringing together psychologists and philosophers, put 1,000 participants through a series of silence-based auditory illusions, and the fact that they produced exactly the same results as their sound-based counterparts suggests that people hear silence. just like they hear sounds.

Philosophers have long debated whether silence is something we can literally perceive, but until now no scientific study has been done to directly address this question, said Chaz Firestone of the university.

The experts wondered if the brain treats silences as it treats sounds. “If silences produce the same illusions as sounds, it may be proof that we literally hear silence after all.” he pointed.

Just like optical illusions trick the eye, auditory illusions can make people hear for longer or shorter periods of time than they really are.

An example is the illusion of “one is more”in which one long beep appears longer than two consecutive short ones, even though the two sequences are equally long.

Based on that illusion, the team substituted moments of silence for sounds, a test they dubbed “one-silence-is-more”.

The results were the same: People thought that one long moment of silence was longer than two short moments of silence. Other illusions of silence gave the same results as the sound illusions.

Participants listened to soundscapes that simulated the bustle of busy restaurants, markets and train stations. They then listened to periods of those audio tracks where all sound stopped abruptly, creating brief silences.

According to the researchers, the idea was not simply that these silences cause people to experience illusions, it was that the same illusions that scientists thought could only be caused by sounds worked just as well when the sounds were replaced with silences.

“There is at least one thing we hear that is not a sound and that is the silence that occurs when sounds disappear” said Ian Phillips, co-author of the study.

The kinds of illusions and effects that seem unique to auditory processing of sound are also achieved with silences.“suggesting that we actually hear absences of sound as well.”

The findings establish a new way of studying the perception of the absence of sound, says the team, who wants to analyze to what extent people hear silence, and if we hear silences that are not preceded by sound.

They also plan to investigate visual disappearances and other examples of things that people may perceive as missing.

Source: EFE