We all crave a bit of peace and quiet now and then – some time to be alone with our thoughts. However, silence may not be as golden as we’ve been led to believe, according to those who’ve visited the quietest place on Earth.
Contrary to what you might expect, this place isn’t located in some remote desert but in a research lab in Minnesota. Inside the anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories, it is so silent that you can hear your own blood flowing and bones moving. The chamber, made of 3.3ft-thick fibreglass acoustic wedges and double walls of insulated steel and thick concrete, absorbs 99.99 percent of sound. The conditions within its Fort Knox-style walls are so intense that the longest anyone has been able to endure in there is 55 minutes.
“We challenge people to sit in the chamber in the dark,” said Steven Orfield, the lab’s founder, in an interview with Hearing Aid Know. “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.”
With the absence of external noise, your ears are forced to adapt to unimaginable silence, focusing inwards on your own mind and bodily functions. After as little as 30 minutes, subjects even begin to hallucinate.
Orfield also explained that it is impossible to stay in a room for more than half an hour without sitting down because a person’s orientation is largely grounded in the sounds they make when moving. “How you orient yourself is through sounds you hear when you walk,” he told the Daily Mail. In the anechoic 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.”
For those who think they could beat the 55-minute record, it is possible to experience the chamber for yourself. The Laboratories offer a tour, named “The Anechoic Experience”, which enables participants to take on the challenge for $600 (around £470) per hour.
The Orfield website states: “We have witnessed many seeming miracles, some of which have explanations and some of which remain mysteries, as a result of time spent in our anechoic chamber. We remain curious about the nature of the chamber’s impact on all people, its therapeutic properties, and how it can influence human perception. While anechoic chambers are traditionally used to study products, ours is becoming also about the people. The Anechoic Experience is designed to be an opportunity to personally inquire about the chamber’s therapeutic and spiritual effects.”
