The Terror of Absolute Silence
An exploration of the psychological effects of the world's quietest room, showing how absolute silence can drive a person insane in under an hour.
About this video
An exploration of the psychological effects of the world's quietest room, showing how absolute silence can drive a person insane in under an hour.
Full transcript of The Terror of Absolute Silence
You can survive weeks without food, but you can't survive forty-five minutes inside total silence. In the quietest room on Earth, the silence doesn't feel peaceful. It becomes a physical weight. Within ten minutes, the external world vanishes. Your ears desperately crank up their sensitivity to find any signal. Suddenly, you hear things you were never meant to. The scraping of your lungs. The rushing of blood in your skull. The heartbeat you normally ignore begins to thud like a heavy, rhythmic bass drum against your ribs. Without acoustic feedback from the floor, you lose your balance. Your brain starts fabricating sounds to fill the void. You begin to hear high-pitched screams and whispering voices that do not exist outside your own head. The record for staying inside is just forty-five minutes. After that, the mind completely breaks. We think we crave peace and quiet. But the truth is, we need the noise to remember we exist. If you were locked in there right now, how long do you think you would last before you started screaming?