People Can Hear Silence, Researchers Find

Have you ever wondered if silence can be heard? While the idea may seem merely impossible, researchers have started exploring auditory illusions and their influence on our perception of time. The astonishing findings hinted that silence might not be mere absence but an audible experience.

The Illusion of Silence

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University aim to uncover whether our brains perceive silence similarly to the other sounds we hear every day. They adapted auditory illusions, usually associated with sound, to create new versions where moments of quietness replaced the original audible signals. Surprisingly, the illusions showed the same effect as their sound counterparts, raising questions about the nature of perception in the absence of sound.

Hearing Absence

Lead author Rui Zhe Goh, a graduate psychology and philosophy student, elaborates on the surprising hints of their research, “We typically think of our sense of hearing as being concerned with sounds. But silence, whatever it is, is not a sound – it’s the absence of sound. Surprisingly, our work suggests that nothing is also something you can hear.” The team aims to investigate whether our brains process silence similarly to sounds or there is another way we process it.

Echoes of Silence

To test their hypothesis, participants engaged in soundscapes of specific locations and then experienced moments of silence in which all sounds ceased. Interestingly, the illusions produced the same effects as those generated by sounds. Chaz Firestone, assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at John Hopkins, commented on the significance of their discovery, “Our approach was to ask whether our brains treat silences the way they treat sounds. If you can get the same illusions with silences as you do with sounds, then that may be evidence that we hear silence after all.”

Paving the Path for New Insights

The researchers’ groundbreaking work sheds light on the perception of silence and opens doors for future exploration. Knowing that it can evoke illusions and effects similar to sounds, the study provides a fresh approach to understanding the perception of absence. Ian Phillips, co-author of the study, emphasized that, “There’s at least one thing that we hear that isn’t a sound, and that’s the silence that happens when sounds go away. The kinds of illusions and effects that look like they are unique to the auditory processing of a sound, we also get them with silences, suggesting we do hear absences of sound too.”