The dreadful sound of silence
The ‘quietest place on earth’ is reputed to drive visitors crazy, said Caity Weaver in The New York Times Magazine. Spending three hours inside seemed like an irresistible challenge.
IN A LEAFY Minneapolis neighborhood under a thick cloak of ivy stands a modest concrete building. Contained within the building is silence exceeding the bounds of human perception. This hush is preserved in a small room, expensively engineered to be echoless. The room of containment, technically an “anechoic chamber,” is the quietest place on the planet— according to some.
What happens to people inside the windowless steel room is the subject of wild speculation. Public fascination with the room exploded 10 years ago, after an article on the Daily Mail’s website claimed that no one had ever “survived” a visit of longer than 45 minutes. “You’ll hear your heart beating,” the room’s soft-spoken proprietor, Steven J. Orfield, of Orfield Laboratories was quoted as saying. And: “In the anechoic chamber, you become the sound.”
Earlier this year, members of the public began, apparently spontaneously, and via TikTok and YouTube, convincing one another that the room was created as an invitation to compete; that spending a few hours alone inside it entitled a person to a cash prize; that the value of this cash prize was up to $7 million; and that anyone could attempt to win it. There was no contest. But the mystique of the too quiet room, if construed by outsiders, has perhaps been bolstered by the company’s website, which advertises an experience called “The Orfield Challenge,” whereby, for $600 an hour, a person can attempt to set a new “record” for time spent in the chamber.
A person inside an anechoic chamber will not hear nothing. The human body is in constant motion—inhaling and expelling air, settling limbs into new positions, pumping blood—and so, constantly creating sounds. An anechoic chamber does not sharpen hearing; it removes the noise that otherwise drowns out the soft, ceaseless sounds of a body, enabling them to be perceived with novel clarity. The body is only totally still—totally silent—in death.
Much of the lore about the chamber’s propensity for mind-annihilation centers on the concept of blood sounds. It is an oft-reported experience, in anechoic chambers, for visitors to become aware of the sound of blood pumping in their heads, or sloshing through veins.
Owing either to blood sound–induced insanity or cost, the record duration in the Orfield chamber was, until very recently, just two hours. I wanted to set a new world record for something. Even more than that, I wanted to hear the forbidden blood song. I emailed Orfield Labs to book a three-hour attempt, and a few days later boarded a plane to Minnesota.
ORFIELD LABORATORIES IS laid out like a rabbit warren: a largely windowless hodgepodge of isolated rooms and passageways of unpredictable sizes and shapes arranged along a meandering path of blind curves. The building was constructed in 1970 as a recording studio, with spaces for multiple musicians to work concurrently without polluting one another’s sessions. In its musical heyday, when the building was known as Sound 80, these included Bob Dylan and Prince.
Steven J. Orfield describes his facility as a multisensory design-research operation. He purchased the anechoic room in the 1980s from Sunbeam, when the appliance manufacturer was closing its Chicago facilities. Figuring it a good investment, he paid members of the University of Chicago football team to disassemble the chamber and load it onto three semi-trucks. In 1994, Orfield reassembled the chamber in Minneapolis, just steps from the room where the disco hit “Funkytown” was recorded, and put it to use for his productdesign clients.
Orfield’s chamber is a six-sided box with walls of 4-inch insulated steel, suspended by springs inside a larger five-sided box, itself contained within the larger laboratory. The chamber is behind a hinged steel block. Rigid brown fiberglass wedges press in upon it from all sides. The wedges poking up from the ground are visible beneath a walkable mesh floor. The whole room smells like old, dry paper and is lightly bouncy.
The lab’s gray-ponytailed manager, Michael Role, outlined the terms I would need to adhere to in order to set a new record: I would need to stay in the room for three hours. It was my choice to have the lights on or off. I opted for total darkness. “Sometimes people like to lay down or sit on the floor, so I leave a nice padded blanket in here,” Role said, handing me a blue blanket—which I spread across the floor—before shutting the door, leaving me in lightless silence.
TO START, I lay on my stomach—a position I felt was relaxed enough for my body to acclimatize to the lack of stimulation, but uncomfortable enough to prevent my immediately falling asleep. I then resolved to lie on my back, and once supine, I experienced the unique and briefly frightening sensation that my ears were traveling up very fast in an elevator while the rest of my body fell gently toward Earth. I had the distinct feeling of my ear canals filling with an inrushing silence that was somehow thicker than the quiet I had first noticed in the chamber.
Within seconds, this ceased, and everything sounded—or rather, continued to have no sound—exactly the same as before. I groped around for the notepad and pen I’d brought and recorded the observations that started to roll in: “gray ponytail,” “thick silence.” But was I recording them? It was impossible to tell in the unrelenting dark. What if the free hotel pen didn’t work? And why do I, a professional journalist, constantly find myself relying on free hotel pens during crucial moments of my assignments?
I had prepared rather thoroughly for this assignment, having contacted Dr. Barbara Shinn-Cunningham, the director of the
Neuroscience Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and asked her if becoming aware of my own body sounds would make me go insane. “No,” she said. “Unless you have a predilection for being insane to begin with—which, you know, could be.”
That opened up a new avenue of inquiry. I called Dr. Oliver Mason, a researcher of psychotic disorders at the University of Surrey, who has led studies monitoring subjects’ experiences in anechoic chambers. “If you take away all sensory input,” Mason said, “our brains, which are always trying to distinguish signal from noise anyway, simply see signal where there objectively isn’t one.”
Mason offered to send me a questionnaire to gauge my psychosis-proneness. Some of its questions prompted obvious answers: “Does it often happen that nearly every thought immediately and automatically suggests an enormous number of ideas?” God, no. I wish. “On occasions, have you seen a person’s face in front of you when no one was in fact there?” No—what? Others caused me to wonder whether what I had always assumed to be typical and commonplace life experiences shared across humankind were, in fact, normal: “When in the dark do you often see shapes and forms even though there’s nothing there?” Yes— what? “Are your thoughts sometimes so strong that you can almost hear them?” Isn’t that just how thoughts work?
I switched to a pencil. Preliminary notes thus recorded (but what if maybe not!), I lay back and imbibed the silence. I had yet to hear the fearsome sound of rushing blood, but my mind had entered a riveting pre-sleep phase, racing through random thoughts and concepts, my attention galloping to keep up. My contemplations reeled to persons who had wronged me, and ways in which I might have revenge— all perfectly legal, of course. At the same time, my brain was delighting me with images of memes I had recently enjoyed, and memories of waiting to be picked up from my elementary school. I thought about things I might say to various celebrities if I ever met them. The Delta Air Lines customer-service hold music, which I had recently listened to for over an hour, mamboed into my head.
Whoops, I was definitely about to fall asleep and still had not managed to sneak a peep at the awesome and terrible abyss of consciousness revealed when overhearing the odyssey of one’s own blood. I whipped my head back and forth to try to make my blood slosh. I detected no liquid movement, but my swishing hair was very loud. Too loud. I fastened it with a clip to quiet it.
INSPIRED BY MY hair, I determined to gather data about other normally quiet things I might do that would now be loud. You know what was loud? Massaging my scalp. Raising my eyebrows was, too. Chomping my teeth produced a resonant sound inside my head. The rustling of my paper as I jotted down notes was extremely loud, too. But always, whenever my movements ceased, the silence of the chamber rushed back in, like the tide obliterating a footprint in the sand.
With no reference points, time passed strangely in the chamber—or rather, I was plagued by worries that time might possibly be passing strangely. The panicked idea “What if I’ve only been in here for 15 minutes?” flapped around my consciousness like a trapped moth for hours—and so it is difficult to say at what point this next thing happened. Let’s call it the two-hour mark: I was lying prostrate on the blanket and trying for (let’s call it) the 40,000th time to hear my blood. I flopped onto my back and, as I did, a bolt of nervous exhilaration shot through me. I had just noticed my first visual hallucination: a sliver of bright light in the darkness. I stared at the sliver for several seconds, waiting for it to mutate into a psychedelic light show, or Satan’s face.
In 1951, Donald Hebb, a professor at McGill University, received a grant from Canada’s Defense Research Board (with the enthusiastic encouragement of the CIA) to study the effects of sensory deprivation. In one experiment, Hebb’s subjects, college students, were led to a small room and instructed to don gloves and cardboard arm sleeves to limit their touch perception, and translucent plastic visors to limit their vision. A U-shaped foam-rubber pillow and the continuous hum of an air-conditioner muffled their hearing. They would be paid $20 a day, they were told, to lie in bed and do nothing.
Few of the students walked away with more than $40 or $60. Many of them said that, after prolonged stints in isolation, they began seeing “images.” The hallucinations tended to manifest first as simple forms like lines or dots of light. Over time, these evolved into complex patterns, and then detailed scenes. One student reported having observed what a researcher recorded as “a procession of squirrels with sacks over their shoulders marching ‘purposefully’ across the visual field.” While initially amused and interested by the images, researchers noted, the subjects eventually found them disturbing and inescapable.
In Orfield’s chamber, the bright line did not mutate under my gaze—except when I took off my glasses, which made it blurry. Was I hallucinating a common effect of removing spectacles? I put my glasses back on; took them back off. There was absolutely a 100 percent correlation between no glasses and the line going fuzzy at the edges. Could this be a sophisticated delusion playing off my brain’s expectation of alterations to my field of vision when I remove my glasses? I wondered. No; I had discovered a hairline crack in the wall of insulation, I realized. I had spent several minutes staring in anxious fascination at a beam of office light.
How many things do we misinterpret as out of the ordinary because we are told online that they are? The sole hallucination I had experienced on my journey to the rumored brink of insanity was one manufactured in the brains of other people: a collective fantasy that a room could be made hazardously quiet. In theory, the internet would seem a likely tool for efficiently obliterating such incorrect notions. In practice, it functions as a loudspeaker placed at the mouth of a cave: It disseminates noise indiscriminately, and this noise grows increasingly distorted and cacophonous as it bounces off the walls in all directions. We, the audience, know this. Yet we insist on finding news in the noise.
Without warning, the overhead light flashed on, and Michael Role pushed open the door to greet me. I felt embarrassed to be caught sitting alone in the dark, as if Role had not left me in that position three hours earlier. Despite the pleasant sensation I noted as I quit the chamber— my time there had been as sedative as a spa visit, only much more expensive and uncomfortable—I left Minneapolis in a melancholy mood. I had not won up to $7 million. I hadn’t even lost my mind.