That golden hush

Next week, for the most part, Metro Manila will be significantly stripped of its usual activity. But something will take over – well, even if not take-over, it will be experienced to an extent that is rare in the days and nights of this metropolis’ life. This is silence. And with that, we experience life differently.

There is never really silence in the sense that sound is absolutely absent. Unless you have a hearing condition that blocks you off from the world of sounds or are in outer space where there is no sound because nothing could carry it, there is always something you can hear even if you don’t want to. A normal conversation is about 60 decibels, a live vacuum cleaner produces 75 and the thing that we city dwellers have to live with everyday – heavy traffic produces 80-89. Health guidelines for decibels put noise above 85 decibels as harmful.

Medical science have well-documented studies on how noise pollution is linked to health problems like heart diseases and anxiety especially because of how it disrupts essential sleep. In children, it is also linked to developmental problems. Noise is increasingly becoming inescapable that aside from privacy and attention, silence would probably count among the things that are hard to keep which makes us long for them. But why?

Aside from the obvious sense of relief that we feel when we have quiet time after a prolonged engagement (voluntarily or not) with a cacophony of noises, what does silence award us?

While music could relax us, silence relaxes us more. A study found that silence seems to have more power to relax us, as seen in our blood pressure and brain circulation, than music that are classified as “relaxing.” While music did have a soothing effect, the pauses in between saw more “relaxed” patterns in the brain and blood pressure.

Another “silent” offer may be in the form of new brain cells in a region of the brain known to store and process a lot of our memories – the hippocampus. This was what a study on mice found. New normal cells in the brain are generally a good thing since as we grow older, we are slow to grow new brain cells. While scientists are not yet sure if these new cells ultimately spell good things in terms of increased mental abilities, they are surprised to see that silence did this to the brain.

One important gift that scientists think silence affords you is that space for your own mind to wander. In silence, there is neither that noise from other people shaping your thoughts or your own insistence on your own thought direction. In silence, you are on some kind of “auto” mode where you knead the internal dough that you have built up – the dough that is made up of all sorts of information from the world. And neuroscientists say that this sort of background noise is rich and the most energy-consuming of all. This is where they think the space for creative work takes place since this is the process that enables one to make connections that were not possible amid the noise.  

Life is commonly associated with noise and motion. But silence is much a part of life as stillness is.  It is like that black plate that makes everything placed on it seem so dramatic and striking. It is not really the absence of sound but our temperance of that constant and inescapable noise which we all hear – noise that annoys, disrupts, disconnects you from the things that should anchor and enrich us.

This is why going away this time of the year for a break should include time with silence. And nature is the most fertile space for that kind of silence. The sound of the forest leaves swishing, the ocean waves lapping, glaciers crushing, animal sounds, the wind rustling are the most abundant silences we could experience. They take the fraying ends of our urban spirits and weave them back to the natural world that sustains us. We need that as sometimes, the razzmatazz of cities gives us the illusion that there is no larger planet beyond our highways and high rises.

Silence is golden. I think we should guard our birthright to that gem. Our sounds will not make sense without them.  – Rappler.com

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