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Peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head

nautil.us

1–10 of 121 posts

Re: Peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head

#3
post #2

"Kirste found that two hours of silence per day prompted cell development in the hippocampus." This was in mice, but if silence turns out to grow neurons in humans too, that will be big news.

I could be far off base here, but I wonder if this could be tied to why humans are generally considered more capable of learning in adolescence - the older someone gets, the more noise they find around them. Lecturers' voices, phones ringing, music, cars and the like are all things you hear progressively more after age 3 or so.

Re: Peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head

#4
post #2

"Kirste found that two hours of silence per day prompted cell development in the hippocampus." This was in mice, but if silence turns out to grow neurons in humans too, that will be big news.

I could be far off base here, but I wonder if this could be tied to why humans are generally considered more capable of learning in adolescence - the older someone gets, the more noise they find around them. Lecturers' voices, phones ringing, music, cars and the like are all things you hear progressively more after age 3 or so.

Primary schools are extremely noisy environments IME.

Re: Peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head

#5
> Here’s how Kirste made sense of the results. She knew that “environmental enrichment,” like the introduction of toys or fellow mice, encouraged the development of neurons because they challenged the brains of mice. Perhaps the total absence of sound may have been so artificial, she reasoned—so alarming, even—that it prompted a higher level of sensitivity or alertness in the mice. Neurogenesis could be an adaptive response to uncanny quiet.

Just a word of caution: Experiments that work in mice don’t necessarily work in humans [1]. These findings are very preliminary, although interesting.

[1] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2016/11/01/the-troubl...

Re: Peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head

#7
post #2

"Kirste found that two hours of silence per day prompted cell development in the hippocampus." This was in mice, but if silence turns out to grow neurons in humans too, that will be big news.

I could be far off base here, but I wonder if this could be tied to why humans are generally considered more capable of learning in adolescence - the older someone gets, the more noise they find around them. Lecturers' voices, phones ringing, music, cars and the like are all things you hear progressively more after age 3 or so.

[deleted]

Re: Peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head

#8
post #2

"Kirste found that two hours of silence per day prompted cell development in the hippocampus." This was in mice, but if silence turns out to grow neurons in humans too, that will be big news.

I could be far off base here, but I wonder if this could be tied to why humans are generally considered more capable of learning in adolescence - the older someone gets, the more noise they find around them. Lecturers' voices, phones ringing, music, cars and the like are all things you hear progressively more after age 3 or so.

[deleted]

Re: Peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head

#10
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could be far off base here, but I wonder if this could be tied to why humans are generally considered more capable of learning in adolescence - the older someone gets, the more noise they find around them. Lecturers' voices, phones ringing, music, cars and the like are all things you hear progressively more after age 3 or so.

Primary schools are extremely noisy environments IME.

Not just the sounds of noise, but the mental busyness as noise... a child's mind is so much less full.

As adults we get so accustomed to "noise" that we often don't realize it's there. Every time I turn around, I have taxes or some other painful administrative thing to do. That's noise in my head that buzzes quietly at times or very loudly as a deadline approaches.

We have job noise - projects, human conflicts, financial concerns etc. There are home relationship noises - fears, doubts, conflicts, whatever.

This is why I suspect the practitioners of meditation claim to have so much peace and such improved intentional focus: they have learned how to turn down the background noise in their minds.

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