Something Extra: The Quietest Place In The World
MIAMI (CBS4) - In this hectic, stressful world, where our senses are constantly under assault, mostly by every imaginable kind of noise, most of us long for some peace and quiet.
But could there be such as thing as too much quiet?
The Guinness Book of World Records says the quietest place on earth is a room at Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis.
The room is called an anechoic chamber because there's no echo, absorbing ninety nine point nine per cent of all sound. It achieves that with large fiberglass wedges, double walls of insulated steel and a foot of concrete beyond that.
But if silence is deafening, super silence is even worse.
In the chamber, ears adapt to the quiet and you start hearing your heart beat, even your lungs.
As Simon and Garfunkel once sang, silence like a cancer grows. People become so disoriented, they start hallucinating. The longest anyone has stayed inside the room is forty five minutes!
Who would have thought that tranquility could be torture, and that instead of noise, it's the sounds of silence that can drive us crazy?
