Unexplainable - Your moments of silence (The Sound Barrier #5)

Episode Date: December 15, 2025

This episode is a follow-up to The Sound Barrier series, which explores our brain's relationship to sound. In our third episode of the series, we asked listeners to try to experience silence and record what they heard. Today, we share the sounds of quiet from across the world in a tribute to John Cage’s 4’33”. Plus, Tinnitus researcher and Unexplainable guest Dan Polley answers your questions from the series. Guest: Dan Polley, tinnitus researcher at Mass Eye and Ear. Thank you to everyone who wrote in and shared their silences. If you still have thoughts or questions about the series,  write us! We also heard from a few teachers who plan to use the series as a part of their curriculum. Is this you? Let us know! For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠. We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, I'm Matt Bouchelle, comedian, writer, and floating head you may or may not have seen on your FYP. And I'm starting a brand new podcast. Wait, don't swipe away. It's called, That Sounds Like a Lot. You know that feeling when you check your phone, read a few headlines and think, That sounds like a lot. I can't do this. Well, I can, and I'm going to get into it every Friday.

You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcast. I'm going to start by breaking down whatever insanity is happening in the world. And then I'll sit down with a comedian or actor or writer or, honestly, anyone who responds to my DMs. This is not the place to get the news, but it is a place to get the news. but it is a place to feel a little bit better about it. That sounds like a lot. Coming May 1st, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Yeah, just a minute.

I just finished the third installment of your sound barrier series, which my cat and I both appear to have loved. So I had to stop doing my dishes to come and record something. It is the day before Thanksgiving. I was cooking some cornbread while you guys had that section of silence. And I heard the sounds of cracking eggs and the mixer going. I heard the brush of my finger against my cheek. And I heard the electronic noise of the inside of my headphones.

It was interesting to me when Noam had us experience silence together. You know, I'm doing my dishes. Suddenly there's nothing. And then I realized there is not silence. There's the water that's running until I shut it off. Then I could hear my fridge and my cat in the other room. demanding my attention. And as I sat there for the four minutes and 33 seconds, my fridge stopped making noise, which was more interesting to me than it had ever been before.

I got goosebumps afterwards, and it just felt really powerful to think about all these people sitting in silence together and what are all of us doing. And, And how wonderful that was. The four minutes and 33 seconds of silence coincided with the exact moment I began to do my makeup this morning. The pencil going into the sharpener, filing layers away. I heard every stroke of my eyebrow pencil as I swiped my brows to fill them in. During my four minutes and 33 seconds of silence, I was able to hear the quiet patter of spring rain coming down on the roof. and water dripping down the side of the house.

The scratch of placing the cap back onto the pencil when I was finished. The ticking of the war clock, the buzzing of the fridge. The pop of my mascara wand going in and out of the tube. The trains passing nearby, as well as the water pipes piping water to the kitchen. The twisting of my highlighter cap opening and closing. The wheel rolling in the track of my bathroom drawer. I heard my stomach processing the pizza I'd eaten about an hour earlier. Finally, the smack of my lips after an application of gloss.

The sounds are always with you, which usually fade into the background, the soundtrack to your very own life. Very interesting and almost tactile experience for someone typically irked by the repetitive noises of life. This is Alex. in Atlanta, Georgia. Hello from Daniel in suburban Melbourne in Australia. I'm in Toronto. It is dark and early, and there is a sliver of orange

rising above the city. My partner is in bed. My dog is on the balcony. And this is the sound of my morning. But listening to the silence, I discovered that the sound of peeling yams is actually distinctly different from peeling parsnips.

peeling parsnips was somehow a softer sound. Almost comforting. My name is Robin Moore. I'm going to record the silence here in my kitchen. This is Dan Shepard in San Dinas, California. Most excellent place to live. We had just gotten a lot of rain and the mosquitoes are back out again. You will hear me slapping my leg to try to keep the mosquitoes away.

This time of year, the Rufus hummingbird and the Anna's hummingbird, they like to argue in fights. You can hear a little of them in the background. I heard goldfinches. You have a couple kinds of goldfinches, the American goldfinch, and the lesser goldfinch, mostly the lesser goldfinches. You might be able to hear the doves and my next-door neighbor. Apparently, she was a former magician's assistant. And she keeps doves in her back garden, and you can hear those occasionally. Today is November 11th.

Here in Canada, we do Remembrance Day on November 11th. And I've participated every year. You go to the Cemeteryath at the corner here in town and watch folks lay a wreath. And at one point, they do a moment of silence. My dad was in the Navy. So I like to go over here. It's just interesting every other year.

The moment of silence has been what I thought was longer than needed. But I think I will think of that differently today. I am in downtown Rochester, tucked away behind a wall to not catch the wind. It can be very strangely peaceful and still feel kind of natural when you're in the middle of a city. It's wild sometimes. Hard not to fill that silence with my own thoughts. I was really amazed by the reaction people had to the room of silence where it seemed super uncomfortable for people to be immersed in absolute complete silence. And that's because for me, I take my hearing aids out and I'm in absolute complete silence.

I don't hear of my heartbeat. I don't hear of myself breathing. I don't hear anything. And that, for me, is quite comforting, actually. actually is my place of being sort of home, you know, like that home-based feel of, ah, yeah, now I'm, you know, I'm good. I do that every night. I take my hearing aids out.

I'm in complete and utter silence. And then I wake up in the morning, totally silent. And so I put my hearing aids in. And then all of a sudden, I am tuned down. I'm awake and alive with the world that's going on around me. It's things are moving and shaken. You can hear just a gentle hum in the room. You can hear yourself walking across the room.

You hear everything. It's like suddenly turning a switch and being kind of, well, more awake. I just thought it was fascinating that people are in general uncomfortable with silence. and thought, well, I'm not, and I wonder how other very hard of hearing people feel and how the deaf community feels about silence, it must be totally different than the hearing folk. One of the things that you won't hear when you're listening to it is the din of the tenetist that is in my ears, which is constantly going and see if it as we speak. It is this eye drone. It's like a high G.

And so sometimes when I'm trying to listen to something quiet, it takes a lot of effort. But I always like to take a moment anyways when there is some quiet time and try to either focus on that sound to tune it out or to like listen to the world around me. Good day, Gordon Taylor from Malamimbi, Australia. I just hit off the third T

and was walking down towards my ball with my headphones on when Noam started the silence. I think it was when I heard him cough in the studio that I realized what I was hearing was just so beautiful and unique to me. The early cicadas of spring, the bird life, the wind noise, the rattle of my clubs.

And the whole time I thought it was someplace quiet. I think I'm going to go take a walk in the woods later and listen to the silence in the woods. It's all about you. And when you fly with Virgin Atlantic in their upper class cabin, They take the VIP treatment to the next level.

With a private wing to check in in your own security channel at London Heathrow, you can glide from your car to their clubhouse, a destination in its own right in 10 minutes or less. On board, you can treat yourself to your own private suite to stretch out in, with lots of storage space, a lie flat bed, and delicious dining from beginning to end.

Just be sure to leave room for dessert. Their mile high tea with all the little cakes and sandwiches is a showstopper. Go to Virgin Atlantic.com to learn more. I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs,

and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Follow Pretty Tough wherever you get your podcasts. I'm a Sted Hearnden, and this is America actually. We're all talking to each other to see what did we do wrong? What did we not see? I'm in Washington, D.C. this week to interview Ruben Gallego. He's a Democratic senator from Arizona, and he's been thinking openly about running for higher office. But he's recently running to some hot water because of his connection to Congressman Eric Swalwell.

I have to learn from this, and I will learn from this. But for me, it's not a 2028. question. It's about what it means to be a better first boss in my office and also a better senator to my constituents. This week on America actually, we asked Gallego

about predatory behavior in Washington. His plans for immigration reform and more. I'm Dan Polly and I'm at Mass Iineer Infirmary where I'm the director of the Lauer Tennis Research Center and professor at Harvard Medical School.

I might have to do this often because of you are right now, but I'm just going to do that again in one second after the siren is gone. After the siren, yeah, which just confirms I work at a hospital. Exactly. I don't know if this is... Ambulance is behind me. We'll try this one time, and then I don't know if we'll keep doing it. But yeah, one more time if you can just say your name and the best way to introduce you. I'm Dan Polly. I'm the director of the Lauer Tenetis Research Center at Mass Ionir and a professor at Harvard Medical School. Okay. So, last time we talked was for the Tenetus episode in

Sound Barrier series. Yeah. And we just got tons of questions from listeners that I'd love to run by you in a sec. But before I get there, I kind of want to ask you a question I had that came up while I was doing this episode. Basically, you have tenetist, right? You told me you got it after you became a researcher. That's true. Yeah.

Yeah. So the other researcher I talked to, Stefan, he also got it after becoming a researcher. and this psychologist I know listened to the episode and told me he got it after working with tinnitus patients for years. And I was even obsessing about tinnitus so much while making this episode that I kind of thought I started hearing things. And I guess I'm wondering, do you think there's anything going on here that's more than just irony, that there might be some kind of connection between focusing on tinnitus a lot and getting it? Okay, so let me play the skeptic.

As researchers, you don't really ever get to choose what you're going to do research on until you're a little bit older. And number one risk factor for tenetis is age. So I think there's like, okay, all right, so like a little bit of a coincidence there. But I started doing research after the Boston Marathon bombings. You know, there were 100 people standing near those blasts that developed it afterwards. You know, I just kind of felt a calling because of wanting to feel. useful to something that was like big and eventful in the city I lived and in the people I worked with. And then I, you know, I was able to relate to it personally because I went to this wedding of a

Scottish postdoc in my lab and the bagpipers and the sound of the music that basically was like the straw that broke the camel's back, I guess after that event, the tentatist that came from being around loud sounds that normally clears up didn't and it's still with me. But the brain is always perched right on the razor's edge of being able to produce tendinous. If you look at the activity of the brain in silence of somebody without tendinous, it's very active. It's not like the brain is quiescent when there isn't a sound. It's just that that activity that's ongoing isn't being read out by your consciousness as a sound. So really what distinguishes all this sort of blinking lights of neurons firing

from being read out as a percept versus not? What is the line between a hallucination and just the ongoing sort of noise of this massive machine at work? This is the key question of why is there a tenetist? It isn't like a switch that goes on or off. It's probably very subtle. What distinguishes activity in the brain during silence

that is just not perceived as anything versus the activity that is perceived at this never-ending, sound. That's not just a philosophical question. That's like what gives me confidence that we can defeat tenetis because it's not like you have to take this aberration in the brain and turn it back to nothing. You just have to disorganize it enough to go back to what it was before you didn't have tendinous, which is still plenty of activity in the presence of silence. It just isn't being read out consciously as a sound. All right. Let's get to some of the questions we got from listeners

on tenetis and silence. Yeah. The first one I wanted to to get into was a question about misophonia. Can you tell me a bit about misophonia, like what it is, how it works? Sure. Mizophonia is a condition where certain sounds elicit a very powerful, very negative emotional reaction. Irritation does not do it justice. It's closer to almost like anger or like rage. It's like extremely unpleasant. So chewing. burping, coughing, sometimes like tapping on the keyboard or clicking a computer mouse will be triggers. So these are often sounds that when they're experienced by someone on the other end, they're like, ah! Yeah. It's extremely irritating. I don't know. I've felt like I've had something

like misophonia for a long time. I remember as a child, when I would hear certain types of mechanical noise, like a fridge or an AC unit, it's hard to describe it. Sometimes sounds. It's sometimes sound like it was angry, and I would kind of freak out as a kid. Is that sort of what misophonia is, this sort of like profound fear, discomfort response to sounds? I'm a neuroscientist, so way I look at it, of all the senses, the auditory system has a really strong interconnectedness with the limbic system. So limbic system regulates mood and emotion. It also is surveilling the environment for threats. So imagine all of these bridges between the hearing parts of the brain and the limbic parts of the brain.

If the weights are changed slightly on them, they can quickly take on an emotional significance. It seems in a way almost like arbitrary. Like why does listening to the sound of a refrigerator sort of elicit this sort of emotional reaction? But the hearing system is the watchman of our bodies, right? it is doing 24-hour surveillance. And so, of course, it sort of has a privileged connection with the parts of our brain that are assessing threats. Because that's what we depend on the auditory system for.

Threats that are other senses might not catch. Threats we might encounter while we're sleeping. So it's a good thing that the auditory system is so heavily interconnected with brain systems that evaluate threats, but it's also a vulnerability. That just makes me think of what you said last time about how people with tinnitus have a whole brain problem, that it's not necessarily just hearing a sound.

It's actually that that sound is maybe getting hooked into their other emotional centers of their brain. I wonder if you think there's a way of connecting them or thinking about them in the same way. In that regard, yes. I mean, what makes them different is that in tinnitus, it's a sound that doesn't exist in the external world.

Amesophonia, it is so about an actual physical sound. So when you think about their upstream, how are they elicited? They couldn't be more different. But they become very similar when you think about the common relationship they share between this emotional response to activity that's flowing out of the auditory centers of the brain. Yeah. Someone else wrote in and was talking about rather than trying to get rid of tenetists, trying to embrace it.

Has that ever been a... conversation you've had to maybe even try to see the beauty in Tenetis? I think about like those guitar cases that like as somebody has owned a guitar for a while, like it just accumulates dings and dense. I mean, as we age, our bodies accumulate injuries and the world has acted on it. It is me and this is my guitar case. It's not brand new. So I really love the spirit of that suggestion. If you experience a it as other, you experience it as being assaulted by it. It's irrepressible. I want to oppress it. It is an adversarial relationship. And of course, like, it's going to bother you.

You're going to come to hate it. If you understand that it is being produced by you, it is a part of you. That's nice. I mean, I think I say all this, like, I'm a researcher because I don't accept that tentative. I don't think that people should have to get used to it. I think that there is a way to silence it. And I am totally hellbent. It consumes, like, it consumes my every waking professional moment of like, how are we actually going to be able to do this? So I don't mean to just offer the glib advice of like, try to embrace it. But at the same time, like, it's a good approach in the absence of some wonderful therapy that my lab or a clinician will come up with.

Like, you know, you've got to use the tools available to you. That's the one that we all have. You know, I was talking to a musician I play with who told me that he's had tenetist for a while because of playing loud music without earplugs. And he told me that when he thinks about his tenetis, it shows him how much of what we hear is kind of like a trick our brain is playing on us. And it reminded me of what you said last time we talked. You said the brain doesn't have direct contact with the physical world,

so everything we perceive as consciousness is constructed from the activity of our brain. Yeah. And I guess I just wonder, does working on tenetis make you amazed or surprised or humbled by what the brain can do? Oh my gosh, yes. Yes, yeah. You know, it seems like so ineffable, you know, just like, how does the brain work? You're like, good luck figuring that out.

You almost need a foothold. So the tentatist is so, you know, I wouldn't, you would never design a brain that way, you think. Like, why, like, what? But it's one of those flaws that, like, you know, there's that line that, um, medicine is the great tutor of biology that, you know, by studying these sort of exceptional cases when the human body doesn't work as it should, that you actually figure out, like, how it manages to work at all. And so, yeah, studying tenderness gives me a foothold to study those operations and appreciate them more because to know that it can fail in this very specific mode gives me an insight into how it works normally.

it fuels a huge amount of the research we do in the lab. It makes me appreciate that it works 99% of the time. This was the fifth installment of our sound barrier series. We might keep putting these out once in a while, so let us know if you have any thoughts or suggestions or questions you want us to look into on the science of hearing. We've also heard from a few teachers who've wanted to use some of the stuff from our series for their students.

If you're using any of our episodes in the class, classroom, please let us know. We'd love to hear about different ways you're using them. And if you need resources, we're always here, so feel free to give us a shout. This episode was produced by me, Noam Hassenfeld. I also wrote the music. Editing from Jorge Just with help from Joanna Salataroff, who's also running the show, mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala, and fact-checking from Melissa Hirsch. Sally Helm is trying to take over the sky. Amy Padula is trying to take over the sea. Meredith Hodnott is our senior supervising producer, Julia Lerner,

Longoria is our editorial director, and Bird Pinkerton took off toward the platypuses. Where's plattie? she yelled. Where's plattie? Finally, one of the platypuses pointed toward a hole in some tree roots by the river. And just barely sticking out of the hole, there was a small guitar. Thanks to all the listeners who sent in emails or voice memos for this episode, Brett, Haley, Alex, Daniel, Daniel, Dan, Alessandra. Joe, Robin Glenn, Gordon, Sarah, David, Mary, Brad, and so many more of you that we didn't get to feature. Every sound in the first half of this episode came from your recordings. I really can't tell you how much it means to me that you listened so carefully and that you wrote in with such thoughtful and generous messages.

Thank you. Thanks also to Vartika Sharma and Paige Vickers for the artwork for the Sound Barrier series. Thanks as always to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show. along with me and Bird. And if any of you out there have thoughts about the show, send us an email. We're at Unexplanable at Vox.com. You can also leave us a review or a rating wherever you listen. It really helps us out.

And if you're into supporting the show even more and all of Vox in general, join our membership program. You can go to Vox.com slash members to sign up. And during the holidays this year, your membership actually goes further. When you join Vox as an annual member, we're going to gift a complementary membership to a reader facing financial barrier. You can read more about all of this at the same site, Vox.com slash members. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we will see you next time.