The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - The Handbook for Sonic Happiness - A Twenty Thousand Hertz/Happiness Lab Mash-up

Episode Date: September 26, 2022

Some sounds bring happy memories flooding back. Other sounds put us on edge; drive us to distraction; or cause us considerable distress. Sound matters... so why don't we pay more attention to our sonic environment?   In a mash-up with our friends at the podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz, Dr. Laurie Santos joins Dallas Taylor to create a Handbook for Sonic Happiness explaining how sound can harm our wellbeing or be a route to greater happiness. Featuring auditory psychologist David Poeppel, psychology researcher Giulia Poerio, clinical psychologist Ali Mattu, sound scholar Mac Hagood and acoustician Trevor Cox.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. We do just about everything we can to make things pleasing for our senses. When we're relaxing at home, we might put on some comfy pajamas and cozy up under a warm blanket. We paint our homes in colors we love and put our favorite pictures up on the wall. We go out to restaurants with our friends or cook amazing meals at home. We might even wear perfume or cologne so that a pleasant smell follows us wherever we go. But while we curate for taste, touch, smell, and vision, we often forget to do the same thing

for the sounds we hear. Yeah, we might dance around to our favorite songs, but sound goes far beyond just music. In fact, we can get rid of sounds that annoy us. And we can surround ourselves with sounds that make us feel good. And this is super important, because studies show that sound has a huge impact on our health and our happiness.

It's a topic I've wanted to explore on the Happiness Lab for a long time. And now I found the perfect person to help me out. I'm Dallas Taylor. Dallas is the host of 20,000 Hertz, a podcast that explores the stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds. Over the years, we've done tons of episodes about sound and how it relates to happiness. We've talked about the benefits of ASMR. Everything's going to be all right. As well as getting rid of noise.

And the power of sonic tourism. I've always wanted to collect these pieces together into kind of a handbook for sonic happiness. A practical guide that can tell us how to make our world sound better so that we can feel better. So, let's get started. You're listening to The Handbook for Sonic Happiness. Chapter one, music. So let's talk about the positive sounds and things that we should pay attention to and try to get more of. The first thing my brain goes to when I think about good sounds is music. So I think a lot about music as almost just like a sonic prescription. For example, when I'm cooking, like I need jazz or like bluegrass of all things.

I don't know why I gravitate to those, but they like really calm me down. This calming effect isn't surprising because we hear music from the start of our lives. When we're in the womb, the heartbeat is the first rhythm we hear and feel. I think there's something built in about this form of emotional regulation. For example, we know that babies as young as five months of age can tell the difference between a piece of music that an adult would say is like a happy tune versus a piece of music that an adult would say is a sad tune. One of the ways it's worth noting that music really affects us is that it's really deeply

entwined with our sympathetic nervous system, which is kind of our fight or flight system. There's alerts that I can play for you that will instantly get your fight or flight system activated as though I slapped you or showed you some really scary thing like a gun or a snake or something like that. But then it can also kind of rev down our system. It can make our pulse go slower. It can do all these interesting physiological effects on our body. And some of those are really good for working out. There's lots of evidence, for example, that if you're playing a super high tempo song, you actually experience less physical exertion when you're exercising. So it's kind of like a legal drug, like a performance enhancing drug to kind of make you not feel the effects of your own physical exertion.

I'm curious, what music do you listen to to do that prescriptive mood thing with music? For me, it's partly the tempo. It's partly what the music is doing to me physiologically. I think sometimes when I'm cooking, I just want something upbeat to put me in a good mood. But for me, it's also music that really connects to memories, you know, so I'm going to be listening to bad 80s pop music, which, you know, puts me in a good mood because it reminds me of Friends back in the day or like bad 90s boy bands. And it's not just listening to music that can affect our mood. Playing music in a group actually makes us feel more connected.

group actually makes us feel more connected. One very compelling experience is the feeling of groupiness, right? Of social cohesion. That's David Popel, professor of auditory psychology at New York University. The first thing is you're a group. And the second thing is you're trying to actually synchronize. One of the very interesting new areas is to try to figure out how not just pairs of people, but entire groups actually become synchronized. I mean, that's why, for instance, an orchestra can work, right, or a choir. When people are musically in sync with one another, their brain activity starts to sync up as well. If I have a group of people chanting,

and I wire them all up with EEG recording equipment, we can show that actually the extent to which they're really synchronized with each other is reflected in their neurophysiological activity very directly. So there is something that is, you know, a universal feature, as if you're doing something in a group, it increases your physiological activity or your synchronization between people. And the more synchronized you are, the better you feel. That, in turn, actually correlates with the extent to which you like the experience or find it engaging. This experience of groupiness doesn't just make people happier.

It can also make them kinder to one another. doesn't just make people happier, it can also make them kinder to one another. It correlates with all kinds of interesting things, like the extent to which you find each other empathic and so on and so forth. Chapter 2. ASMR Please note, the following two chapters on ASMR and misophonia contain noises that might be triggers for people who are sensitive to certain sounds. If you don't want to hear them, please skip forward by about 13 minutes.

To skip only the ASMR chapter, skip forward by about 4 minutes. So Dallas, tell me about ASMR. So ASMR stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. And I didn't even realize I had this until I did a show about it. But what it is, is when you listen to very delicate sounds, traditionally, like somebody whispering or just like really whispering in your ear really nicely and sweetly. What that can trigger internally is this tingling sensation that starts kind of at the base of your neck and goes up into your head and down shoulders. I am literally having it right now because I can trigger it at any point. now because I can trigger it at any point. So there's all these ASMR artists on YouTube doing everything from like whispering very quietly, like sweet, happy things. Everything's going to be all right.

To someone who might just be manipulating an object that just crackles. To in the case of somebody that I spoke with, eating pickles into a microphone. And that triggers this kind of like tingly response. What's interesting about ASMR is that it's a stimulus in one modality, like sound, that is producing a tactile sensation. That's Julia Poirio, a psychology researcher studying ASMR at the University of Sheffield. So you are experiencing almost the feeling of being touched through sound. ASMR might feel great for some people, but not everyone has it.

And for the people who do have it… People generally fall into one of two categories. They either think that ASMR is something that everybody has, or they think that they're the only person that's had it, and they don't realize that it's something that other people experience. So a lot of people, when they find out about the ASMR community and they find out that they can watch these videos on YouTube, they're like, wow, this is amazing because this is something that I've experienced all my life and I didn't know that I could go and intentionally experience it. One of the things I think is really interesting about sound is I feel like

we don't really understand its effects on our psychology very well. I mean, we could point to specific kinds of sounds that affect us strongly. Like if I was to blast a siren right now in the middle of this podcast episode, you have the sense and could probably accurately forecast that it would make you feel a little bit stressed. But when you're talking about eating a pickle very quietly or whispering, I'm not sure that's a case where I have like strong affective predictions about how this is going to feel. I might get the direction right, but I definitely wouldn't have predicted before we started having this conversation, like tingly feeling inside my head.

And I think this is just generally true of sound where we really don't have strong intuitions about how it's going to affect us. So that there are these kinds of funny cases like ASMR, about how it's going to affect us. So that there are these kinds of funny cases like ASMR, where you get people whispering on YouTube, Hello, everyone. Long time no see. And it profoundly affects the listeners who are hearing it. So is it safe to assume that you've never experienced ASMR?

Yeah, no, I definitely get chills. But for me, those kinds of chills tend to come from different kinds of things. Not to say I wouldn't get them from ASMR, but, you know, something like an awe-inspiring piece. Or, you know, a sound or a piece of music that really reminds me of an important memory, right? But yeah, there's this kind of interesting question about why sound can affect us so profoundly. You know, something like whispering, you could imagine it being connected with certain kinds of acoustic signals that are very familiar with caregiving or like infant-directed speech. You could imagine these kinds of cases, you know, and so maybe we have some leftover physiology that goes with that stuff. But I think it's more just interesting that we can start playing with sound in a different way now and noticing interesting things about it that we might not have documented well before. But the question is, can ASMR actually make us happier?

I mean, there's not really any great research on this, but my guess is that listening to these acoustic signals that are kind of interesting and sort of quiet can make us a little bit more present. And there's lots of evidence that being mindful and being present can make us feel better and increase our positive mood. I also think that these kinds of sounds can actually make us a little bit calmer. I mean, a lot of these sounds are sort of quiet. They make us listen more carefully. I think they might actually decrease our fight or flight system. But again, all of this is just speculation. I think it'd be great to actually explore whether or not ASMR sounds can make us happier. I think we just don't know yet. The Handbook for Sonic Happiness will continue after these messages.

We now return to The Handbook for Sonic Happiness. Chapter 3. Misophonia. When we've gotten into the topic of misophonia, which literally translates to the hatred of sound, most people have no idea that they have it. And sometimes it's like tied in with like a sensory sensitivity in general. But essentially, it can give people extreme panic reactions to certain sounds that to some people is perfectly fine. So think of someone kind of uses their teeth to scrape food off of a fork. Or the most classic is nails on a chalkboard. But that idea goes much further into normal sounds

that people have these really strong reactions to. It feels like a bear is chasing you. That's Meredith Rosel. You freeze. Whatever you're doing, you're not able to focus on anymore. Your heart races. You feel tense. You feel irritable.

And not just mildly irritable, like you're really irritable. Her misophonia started when she was six, and it caused problems at home. The hardest part was listening to my parents chew. So at the dinner table, I would cry, and my mom would not know what was wrong. And that would frustrate her. So dinner time was the hardest. For most of us, chewing just sounds normal. We might not even notice it. But Dr. Ali Mattu, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University,

says that misophonics have a totally different experience. You're experiencing it as if someone is chewing right in your face to the point where maybe their spit or the bits of their food are just flying all over you. So maybe it's tapping into this basic aversion that we all have. But again, the volume of these sounds, the experience of these sounds are turned up way high for people who have misophonia. Psychiatrists have only recently become aware of misophonia. beginning to better understand, like ASMR, like synesthesia. We're beginning to understand that our senses are more complicated and there's more diversity how we experience our senses than we knew before. And we're still not exactly sure what causes misophonia. We're beginning to think that how people experience sounds and also how they are

connected to memories and the way people regulate their emotions is very different for people who have misophonia versus those who don't. So we don't really know why that is. I have theories, but I don't have any data to back it up. Now, it's natural to have some reaction to the sounds you've heard in this chapter, like the chalkboard scraping and the chewing. And that's because these are extreme examples. But for people like Meredith, the sounds that trigger her misophonia can be much more subtle, and they can come from anywhere. My triggers are eating, gum popping, slurping, feet shuffling, bass coming from cars and apartments, keyboard typing. Newer ones are whistling and humming.

At the moment, there is no cure for misophonia, but there are techniques that can help people to manage it. It's about learning how to distract yourself from the anger in a healthy way. So finding activities that distract you from sounds, making a comparison to a different time when you were coping better with a situation or comparing yourself to someone else who might be struggling more. Temporarily pushing yourself away from the situation that is difficult for you and creating sensations that shock your body into focusing on something else. Yeah, I think that like kind of opening people's minds to become a little bit more conscious,

active listening, and associating mood with certain sounds and sonic environments can really help people understand this mystery of sometimes when somebody's in a bad mood. Yeah, this was happening to me today, which is very salient because I knew I was going to have this conversation with you. I was in my office at Yale and was just feeling kind of frustrated, like I was trying to check my email. And then I had this realization that there was a horrid beeping sound happening somewhere down the hallway that had probably been going on for like the last 45 minutes. And I was like, wait a minute, my mood is intricately tied to this annoying sound that's been repetitively going off. And it's probably not just my mood. We know that sound can automatically affect our attention, right? You know, we have this limited store of attention, this spotlight when I'm trying to do some work on a computer and get my emails

done. If part of my brain is naturally going vigilantly to like, what is this random sound that's going on in the background? I might not notice all that consciously, but my processing speed is going down. It's feeling a little bit more frustrating to do this kind of thing. You know, I think there are these clear cases where our sound environment is negatively affecting us and we might not even consciously realize it. Chapter four, noise. There's one funny study I tell my students about in my class that looked at how well you savor a positive experience when you get a phone ding. So they had people experiencing a massage,

get a phone ding. So they had people experiencing a massage and there's just a phone in the background that just dings once during the massage. Your enjoyment of the massage goes down like a whole point on a 10-point scale just because you heard that ding. There was another study that looked at people playing Mario Kart. So you're playing Mario Kart, right? And you just hear your phone buzz in the background. All of a sudden, your enjoyment of that Mario Kart game goes down just because you heard a little text message. I think we forget the strong consequences that noise can have for us. Maybe not the whine of a refrigerator,

but outside construction noise, have for us. Maybe not the wine of a refrigerator, but outside construction noise, outside traffic noise. The evidence that this stuff is affecting us deeply is stronger than we really think. There's lots of evidence, for example, that hospital patients that are in louder rooms with like louder noise mechanisms and like beeping things wind up healing from surgeries more slowly than patients that happen to be in more quiet rooms. And the effects on kids is profound. Some super famous studies in the 1970s showed that kids who live on, like, the lower floors of an apartment building in New York that happened to be, like, near a big bridge,

they wind up showing reading scores that are worse than the kids on the higher floors. And at first folks were like, oh my gosh, ambient sound is kind of messing up learning. And folks fought this because that's not people's intuition of, well, how can sound affect learning? Maybe the people on the lower floors are, you know, of a lower income, you know, maybe there's something else correlated with it. And then finally, this guy, Gary Evans at Cornell was able to do a really cool study on this. He was studying noise pollution near the Munich airport. And just as it would happen, they decided to move the Munich airport. I guess it was under renovation, and so they moved it somewhere else. So he was able to track kids learning who were near the super loud airport,

and then the airport moved, versus kids who were at the new spot for the airport, and compare what happened. And what he finds is, if you look at, say, like third and fourth graders, like reading scores go up when the airport moves for the kids who live near the loud airport. And the kids who are now near, like, the new place where the airport goes, their reading scores go down over time. And so all this goes to say that I think, you know, if you were asked those folks, hey, is it noisy?

They'd probably consciously realize like, oh, it's noisy. But would you think like, you know, is it messing up your cognitive processing? I think people don't really realize this stuff. And it can have huge effects on things that matter a lot for your happiness. It doesn't just make you happier because that annoying sound is gone. There's evidence that if you have less annoying sounds around, you're more likely to be nicer to people. You just become a worse person when there's bad sounds around. But there are simple things we can do to make our lives quieter.

It's time to play the quiet game. The game where you could win a quieter life. But first, you have to complete all four stages. Let's play. Stage one. Spray all of the door hinges in your home with WD-40. I do this every few months. Stage 2.

Turn off every appliance in your home. Then turn them back on again, one by one. If you find one that's making a lot of noise, there might be something that needs fixing, or maybe eventually you can replace it. Stage 3 Consider adding more soft materials to your home, like curtains, throw blankets, pillows, rugs, and fabric-based furniture. These will soak up sound so your home feels quieter and more intimate. Stage 4

Put your phone in silent mode. so your home feels quieter and more intimate. Stage four. Put your phone in silent mode. Your phone should work for you, not the other way around. Congratulations. You have won yourself a quieter life. Thanks for playing the quiet game. We'll hear you next time. you next time. Chapter 5 Sleep

So we've talked about how noisy sounds can negatively affect our emotional state, our learning state, but there's another thing that noise in particular can negatively affect, and that, our learning state. But there's another thing that noise in particular can negatively affect, and that's our sleep. If I could change one thing about my current college students' mental health, I would make them sleep more because instantly that would improve their levels of depression, their levels of anxiety, their wakefulness in class. We forget that sleep is so essential

for our mental health and sound can really affect sleep. Do you have any like sonic rituals that you have to do around sleep? So I definitely wake up a lot in the middle of the night. These days I listen to a lot of sleep meditations and And for me, these are really powerful for just like helping me fall asleep. Here's a part of a sleep meditation from a YouTuber named Jason Stevenson. And as you gaze out the window, you admire the radiant colors that are spread across the sky. Violet, pink, and amber streaks dazzle your eyes. Sleep meditations are amazing.

They've been really helpful for me. I can't sleep without some form of noise, like white noise. The reason that this white noise is useful in that circumstance is that white noise is basically sound that's covering all of the possible sounds that your ears could hear. That's Mac Haygood. I'm a sound scholar at Miami University of Ohio. a sound scholar at Miami University of Ohio. The same way that white light is a combination of every color, white noise is a combination of all the frequencies that we can hear.

And the reason that's useful is you could have any sound in any particular frequency. Like the sound of a dog barking, which is in the 1000 to 2000 hertz range. And part of that frequency range of the white noise is going to be covering that up. And so this is known as masking, where one sound, if it's in a similar frequency range to another sound, it will cover that sound up. range to another sound, it will cover that sound up. While you used to need a dedicated device for white noise, these days you can just download an app. These apps also include nature sounds like bird calls, wind, and every kind of rain you could imagine. You might think, well, rain is rain. But actually, people want the exact kind of rain that they have a really positive emotional, psychological association with.

So people want rain on a tent, rain on a tarp, rain on a tin roof, on a slate roof. They want a big storm. They want a light drizzle. They want a big storm or they want a light drizzle. I had one app developer tell me, if I have to make another kind of rain, I'm going to lose my mind. So why do many of us need to cover up the random sounds around us in order to get a good night's sleep? Our auditory systems have evolved over time to aid us and to protect us and to be alert and ready for things.

And it was probably pretty useful when we were sleeping outdoors on the Savannah to be a light sleeper, right? And be tuned in the sounds that are happening out there. So just because our physical circumstances has changed and we sleep in these quite safe houses, that doesn't mean that our auditory systems have completely changed in that way. The way our attention works is we can't say, Hey attention, I'm about to fall asleep, please stop paying attention to distracting sounds that pop out. You hear the creak. You hear the dog bark outside. Your brain notices that, but also it comes with a certain amount of wakefulness, right? Like these moments where our attention gets cued make us feel more vigilant.

So we're like, and the comes with a whole rush of, you know, our neural system throwing in all these arousal mechanisms like we're noticing now. You throw the white noise on, if you can block those out, your brain just has less moments to notice that stuff, which allows you to fall asleep faster. The Handbook for Sonic Happiness will conclude after a short break. Welcome back to The Handbook for Sonic Happiness. Chapter 6, Hearing Protection. So this is something that I'm really passionate about, mainly because how loud this world is compared to our primitive ears. And as we get older, it is natural for people to lose the highest frequencies in their hearing. For example, my show is called 20,000 Hertz.

20,000 Hertz is basically the highest frequency that we humans can hear when we were kids. And so if it was more accurate to me, it'd probably be called like 16,500 hertz at my age range. It's bad that you have to change the name of your podcast as you get older. Down to 12,000 hertz. But it is totally, totally normal for these higher frequencies to diminish with age. And it doesn't mean that you can't enjoy hearing. It's just part of life. But if you're not careful, it is possible to damage your hearing permanently. That kind of damage is different and preventable. The best way to think of hearing protection

is to think of it like sunscreen. You can lie on the beach in the sun for a few minutes without it, but if you're going to be there for a long time, you're going to need it. And with sound, a few minutes in a loud space is OK. But any longer, and you're going to risk permanently damaging your hearing. Once it's damaged, it's not like skin that got burnt in the sun.

The hair cells in your ears that capture sound never grow back. Once they're gone, they're gone. But yeah, hearing protection. I think everyone should have earplugs in their pocket. Anything from the simplest little foam earplugs to something a little bit fancier. I always keep them with me. And it's not just because I'm a sound designer. It's just that I find myself in the gym and my watch will go off saying, this is loud. In 20 minutes, you're going to start doing hearing damage.

Or I'll find myself in a loud restaurant or I'll find myself at a loud concert. If I'm giving my kids a bath, they're just having a ball splashing and screaming and stuff. But I just start to get really tense because it's so loud in this little bathroom. And my stress level of just having the control of being able to plug that feels nice to me. But yeah, I was wondering if you have any thoughts on hearing protection. I think it's super important. I mean, we often discount our future selves and forget what our future selves preferences might be. Everybody's hearing is going to get a little worse over time, but it can get a lot worse if you're not being really careful. I think that we forget the cost that hearing damage can cause, especially socially, right? Losing the frequencies

that are most important for hearing a conversation over a slightly louder restaurant, that deeply affects your quality of life. It deeply affects your social connection. It deeply affects your well-being over time. And so taking steps ahead of time to protect that is really important for your future self, but it's also important for you now because we see that noise makes us grumpier. It makes us worse people. It makes us feel a little bit more frustrated and it makes it harder for us to regulate our attention and our presence. So I love this idea of just the earplugs in your pocket that you can just pop in. And my argument is, I know it's hard to really convince people about preventative measures in hearing, just like it is with sunscreen, but I wouldn't even make that as

my primary argument. I would recommend anyone just have it, just have it around, always accessible because you know when you need it. And just, there's a very stark contrast when I suddenly realize, oh, I really need earplugs. To me, it's almost just like a little blankie or like a little bear, like it's my like protective mechanism. Not because I'm a sound designer, not because I, you know, want to protect hearing so much. It's very much in the moment an anxiety pacifier for me. And, you know, functionally what you're doing is like some sound that's really tripping up your fight or flight system. That's causing you and your body to feel like there's a tiger attacking me right now. You can get rid of that tiger. And in the moment that can have a huge effect on, you know, how you're feeling.

Chapter 7. Sonic Tourism. I know one of the things you've talked about is this idea of sonic tourism. So what's sonic tourism? It sounds kind of amazing. So it's, you know, when we go sightseeing, it's very similar to that. We sightsee for a reason because there's that difference between a picture or a video and what we feel there in the place because all of your senses are firing up. But the idea of becoming more conscious with your hearing in these moments, for me, has brought a lot of joy. And it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to go seek out some special sonic touristy place. There are lots of them. There's a lot of buildings with whispering galleries. And usually you're going to find those when there's a lot of arches and

kind of a dome. So like in Grand Central Station in New York City. So what's happening is one person can stand in the corner of one side of the room. Somebody else can whisper into one in the other corner pretty far away. But the way that the dome is, is that it'll carry that signal very clearly kind of up and over to where you hear it really clearly on the other side. This is one of my favorite things to do when people visit New York and come in on the train. In New Haven, Connecticut, where I live, it like plops you right into that spot in Grand Central Station. And every time I'm there with a new person, I'm like, let's go to this room and stand in here. Just stand there. Just stand there. And you'd be like, what? Whoa. I think

it's people's favorite spot in New York. There's lots of places where sound is as important or maybe more important than the visuals. That's acoustician Trevor Cox. Trevor wrote an entire book on sonic tourism called Sonic Wonderland. The premise of Sonic Wonderland was to go and find the most incredible, most gobsmacking sounds you could find in the world. One of his favorites are the singing sand dunes of Kelso Dune Field in the Mojave Desert. It is an exhausting experience going to hear these sand dunes. It's

incredibly hot in the middle of summer, so it's a struggle to walk up them to start with. But once you get to the top, you hear a totally unique sound. You know when you're in the right place almost immediately because you walk on the dune and it sounds a bit like a bad played tuba sort of. In the literature, they talk about this being a burping sound, but I think it sounds more like a badly played wind instrument. So that's one aspect.

And then there's a completely opposite aspect of something like an anechoic chamber. Have you been in one of those? I have. It's really creepy. I find it incredibly disturbing. And in a kind of trippy, you know, oh, what a cool experience way. So to explain what an anechoic chamber is, if we were doing an echoic chamber, that would be like a symphony hall. Lots of echoes, lots of sound bouncing around. Anechoic is the lack of that echo.

So when you speak or when you clap, there is no residual sound. It just goes and it's done. And what's funny is it's terrifying for you. Interestingly for me, I've been in one for a long period of time with the lights out. So when I got in it, I was just like, oh, this just feels soothing. It just feels quiet. The cool thing about it though is when the door's shut and I'm standing there, there's no echo. What happens is there's first this realization of, whoa, okay, this is disorienting. I almost want to fall over because I just feel like something's gone.

Okay, so I'm rolling, and you're going to shut the doors and leave me in here for a little while. That's right. Have fun. Have fun. All right, I think I've been in here for about seven or eight minutes one thing that people talk about when they go into anechoic chambers is pressure so i do feel pressure which is odd because there's nothing that would actually be putting pressure on my eardrums, but having no sound at all feels a little bit like being under the water far enough where it starts to hurt your ears.

That's kind of what it feels like. And I hear a high-pitched, I don't know if I'd say I'd hear it, but I perceive a high-pitched noise. It's got to be something that's just in my brain or ear. My brain is interpreting it as audible, but I don't know if it is. It's not a single tone, but it's like high-pitched noise. So another phenomenon is that you start to hear your internal organs more the longer you're in here. So I'm starting to hear my heartbeat. I can't even like breathe through my nose because it's so loud. internal organs more the longer you're in here. So I'm starting to hear my heartbeat. I can't even like breathe through my nose cause it's so loud. So you should hear a pretty loud rush of air

when they open this door. He's alive. I survived. What was your experience? Mine is just that it sounds kind of weird. I also have some ear balance things. My ears don't like it when there's no reverb happening. It feels like I'm about to be on a plane and my ears might pop or something.

I wish that there's an anechoic chamber like in every state or in every city, just as a tourist attraction, because it is very disorienting. Right. But you don't need a whispering gallery or an anechoic chamber to be a sonic tourist. All you really need to do is step outside. So I think there's all these sounds in nature that just feel evolutionarily nice. You know, we're kind of built to hear them. But nature sounds also can bring about new kinds of emotions. that just feel evolutionarily nice. You know, we're kind of built to hear them.

But nature sounds also can bring about new kinds of emotions. And one of my favorite emotions that you can get from natural sounds is this emotion of awe, this sense that the world is bigger than us, we see something really beautiful, and it can let us rethink our relationship with things. I think there are these interesting natural sounds that tend to do that for us, that bring up this emotion of awe in a way that we might not expect. I'm thinking of the sound of wind and like a big storm. You know, I've experienced this being in New England or

hearing hurricanes or just the sound of surf or really different kinds of cool animals. You just feel this interesting connection to something bigger than you, whether that's the natural world or something spiritual. And there's so much evidence that experiencing awe can improve our well-being over time, can make you feel more socially connected with other people in the world around you. And I think this is something we miss out on the natural world, is that our auditory environment can actually give us this sense of awe. I think we can all relate with being on the internet,

on social media or in work or an email or whatnot. To me, that's sonically like an anechoic chamber. It's very me focused. I'm getting sucked into my brain and I'm starting to hear all of my thoughts. I'm hearing all of my fears and I'm doing all of my second guessing. But when I go out and I listen to nature or have a conversation with a real person or go to a concert and hear things that are outside of myself, it's awe-inspiring. And it reminds me that I'm a piece of a greater humanity. So I don't think it has to even be like grand. You don't have to go to the ocean, but being mindful of the things around you,

going for a walk in the neighborhood for me, it feels like nature. So it's within reach. This episode was a co-production between 20,000 Hertz and the Happiness Lab. Over on 20,000 Hertz, Dallas shares stories behind the world's most recognizable sounds, like famous sonic logos from HBO, Windows, Apple, and Netflix. My 10-year-old daughter, she's wandering about, and I go, Samara, I need some help. Go over here. And I played for Samara our five top sounds, and she was immediately, no hesitation, it's so obvious, Dad, it's this one. And she was

gesturing towards the sound file for the one that we used, the ta-dum. They also share some surprising human moments, like the inventor who hid in a bathroom, just so she could pitch her idea for a new digital format to a famous director. I hid myself in the restroom for 10 hours. And I was able to meet Spielberg. I just jumped on him. And of course, there are lots of episodes about finding joy through sound. Because we're all audiophiles. We just haven't realized it yet. So subscribe to 20,000 Hertz now, right here in your podcast player. Until next time, stay safe and stay happy.