There’s one more misuse of silence, the kind that keeps us from trusting or pursuing good silence, and that’s deprivation. Deprivation is not silencing others; it is living in it yourself. Overdosing on silence. Deprivation exists because it is possible to have too much silence. And that shouldn’t be surprising. As you know from experience, you can have too much of anything. Too much pizza, or too much hair product.

There’s something called an anechoic chamber at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, and some who’ve been there have documented their experience of too much silence. In this room (one of several across the world) it is so silent that, after a short while, you can hear your heartbeat, without the need for a stethoscope. When you move, your bones make a grinding noise. The silence is disorienting and, eventually debilitating. After several minutes, most people who experience the anechoic chamber lose their balance and fall to the floor, because their ears aren’t giving their brain the normal aural feedback about where they are. This is the world’s quietest place, with a noise level of negative 20 decibels.[1]

“In the anechoic chamber,” says the founder of another such space in Minnesota, “you become the sound.” That isn’t just a physical phenomenon, like the heartbeats and bones I mentioned. It also means you’re left to your own thoughts and anything else stored up in your heart. Almost certainly as a result, many who’ve experienced the anechoic chamber start to panic and can stay no longer than several minutes. Curiously, people with mental anxiety, dementia, autism, ADHD, anxiety? They find it calming.[2]

Silence, as we’ll see in later chapters, can be profoundly good; but you can even have too much of a good thing. In our metaphor of music, if you have mainly silence and not sound, that’s no more music than uninterrupted noise is. Instead, that too-much silence can become desperate for sound—any sound—to accompany it.

At the end of the groundbreaking television series Breaking Bad, there’s just such an instance. Walter White, the chemistry teacher turned meth lab tycoon, is nearly caught by police and so he hires someone to disappear him, to take him out into the middle of nowhere, a place no one can find him and one he doesn’t even know himself.[3]

It’s quiet up there, more than two thousand miles away from his hometown, stuck in a frozen landscape with no one in earshot. It’s so silent that Walt starts to get desperate. His only human contact is the man who drove him there, and who brings him groceries and newspapers once a month. The experience of hearing another human becomes so valuable that Walt gladly gives the man $10,000 to stay an extra hour and play cards with him. This is the silence of deprivation.

Much longer ago, and in real life, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II conducted some 13th-century experiments to explore what would happen in a complete immersion in silence. At the time, some people speculated that babies came from heaven and so spoke the language of angels. As a result, and in only one of his many barbaric experiments, Frederick put several infants under the care of nurses who were instructed to go about their normal care, but in absolute silence. For years. Unfortunately for Frederick and much more so for the babies, no one ever learned what language babies would speak, because all of the babies died.[4]

You can have too much silence. And, if you do, you’ve likely soured on the idea of silence altogether. You’re unlikely to see any amount of it as valuable. What you’ve experienced is not noise, but it’s certainly not music either. Whether you know it or not, you’re ready for good kinds of silence in healthy measure.

[1] On the experience of Microsoft’s anechoic chamber, see https://www.cnn.com/style/article/anechoic-chamber-worlds-quietest-room/index.html.

[2] On the Minnesota-based anechoic chamber, see https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/earths-quietest-place-will-drive-you-crazy-in-45-minutes-180948160/.

[3] The Breaking Bad scene as described (from “Granite State,” season 5, episode 15) is currently available on Netflix but was originally broadcast on AMC.

[4] Frederick II’s language deprivation experiments are discussed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_deprivation_experiments.

Selah

Take a few minutes to consider the following questions:

Have I ever had too much silence in my life? How would I describe that time?

Do I have too much silence in my life right now? If so, what should I do about it?

Is anyone in my life experiencing too much silence? What might I do about that?