NYT
Silence Is a ‘Sound’ You Hear, Study Suggests
In auditory illusion tests, people perceive silence as a form of sound, just as Simon and Garfunkel suggested.
The hush at the end of the musical performance. The pause in a dramatic speech. The muted moment when you turn off the car. What is it that we hear when we hear nothing at all? Are we detecting silence? Or are we just hearing nothing and interpreting that absence as silence?
The “Sound of Silence” is a philosophical question that made for one of Simon & Garfunkel’s most enduring songs, but it’s also a subject that can be tested by psychologists. In a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers used a series of sonic illusions to show that people perceive silences much as they hear sounds. While the study offers no insight into how our brains might be processing silence, the results suggest that people perceive silence as its own type of “sound,” not just as a gap between noises.
‘The vision that was planted in my brain still remains’
Rui Zhe Goh, a graduate student in cognitive science and philosophy at Johns Hopkins University and one of the scientists involved in the study, described a koan that he likes: “Silence is the experience of time passing.” He said he interprets that to mean that silence is “an auditory experience of pure time.”
That idea made him wonder whether silence, the absence of sound, was something that we really experience, “or is silence just kind of the lack of experience?”
Chaz Firestone, a cognitive scientist at Johns Hopkins and another author of the study, said that if silence is “not really a sound, and yet it turns out that we can hear it, then evidently, hearing is about more than just sounds.”
But simply asking “Can you perceive silence?” is a difficult question. So the two researchers, with Ian Phillips, a philosopher, asked a different question: Does the mind treat silence the same way it treats sounds?
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or listen to the The Sounds of Silence