Every time I used to play the silent game with the girls when they were younger in the car, I felt guilty. You know the one. Where you set up a contest between the children to see who could stay quiet the longest and hope it went on for the whole car journey! I admit I played that game often, more so for my sanity than for anything else.
And before anyone judges me, or others like me, who have spent many a car journeys playing that game ... read on! A 2013 study published in the journal Brain, Structure and Function monitored mice under the effects of both silence and different types of noise. What they found shocked the scientists – they discovered that two hours of silence per day promoted cell growth in the hippocampus in the brain.
This part of the brain controls memory, emotion and learning.
“We saw that silence is really helping the new generated cells to differentiate into neurons, and integrate into the system,” says researcher Imke Kirste. In our busy, hectic lives we do not pay much attention to how polluted our brains are, because of everything constantly happening around us. There is also the pollution of sound that overstimulates our brains causing stress, moodiness, depression, anxiety among other things.
We are programmed to hear certain sounds in our everyday lives without even noticing them.
Scientific studies show noise causes more damage than we realise. However, research suggests that this is reversible. Silence, say researchers, has repairing powers! Before the modern world, we got to enjoy natural sounds in our environment, flowing rivers, howling wind, the barking of dogs and such. However, today, these have been tainted with sounds of machinery, cars, technology and other noisy contraptions that take away from the necessity of silence.
They say while silence is highly sought after and greatly revered, we do not get nearly enough of it. So, science proves that silence can help to literally restore our brain. A 2001 study defined a “default mode” of brain function that showed that even during resting states, the brain actively stores and evaluates information. Follow-up research found that the default mode allows us to engage in quiet self-reflection.
Studies suggest that when the brain rests, it can then internalise and evaluate information in “a conscious workspace”.
Not surprisingly, the exposure to noise can result in elevated stress levels in the body, which means bad news for our long-term health. The sound waves reach the brain as electrical signals via the ear and the body reacts to these signals even during periods of sleep. In 2002, a study examined children’s brains after Munich’s airport got relocated. Gary W Evans, a professor of human ecology at Cornell University, says children who become exposed to a certain noise eventually learn to ignore the noise since it triggers a stress response within the body.
However, the noise caused the children to not only ignore annoying or loud stimuli; they also ignored other stimuli that they should be focusing on, such as speech. “This study is among the strongest, probably the most definitive proof that noise – even at levels that do not produce any hearing damage – causes stress and is harmful to humans,” says Professor Evans. Noise was also found to negatively affect task performance at work and school. It can also cause decrease in motivation and an increase in errors.
So I guess silence is golden after all!