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Three minutes of silence resets ears
People are becoming desensitized. Media have to scream headlines to get attention, and that makes it harder to notice the quiet, the subtle, and the understated.
Silence works as the counterweight. Three minutes a day recalibrates what the ears expect, and absolute silence is not required: if it can't be found, quiet is absolutely fine.
How do ears recover from loud sound?
After loud noise, the sensory hair cells in the cochlea tire and hearing sensitivity drops, a change called temporary threshold shift. With moderate exposure, sensitivity typically returns within hours once the surroundings are quieter. The size of the shift is measured in decibels, and it grows with the loudness and the length of the exposure.
Does silence do anything to the brain?
In 2013, Imke Kirste and colleagues at Duke University reported in Brain Structure and Function that mice given two hours of silence a day grew new cells in the hippocampus. Mice exposed to other sound conditions, including music and white noise, did not show the same increase. The silence group had originally been meant as the control.
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