Since the time of the scientist and philosopher Aristotle Discuss Is silence “heard”. A new series of experiments for researchers from Johns Hopkins University in the United States The problem may be solved.
The search cleverly uses a well-known trick called One more than an illusionfooling the listener’s mind into thinking that two separate sounds are shorter than one, when in fact the total time is the same.
When replacing sound with silence, the team found that this illusion still worked. You can Try it yourself. One continuous silence is considered longer than two separate silences, even though they are actually the same length.
“Silence, whatever it is, is not sound – it is the absence of sound.” He said Rui Z Goh is a graduate student in philosophy and psychology from Johns Hopkins University. “It is surprising that what our work suggests is just that There isn’t anything It’s also something you can hear.”
Researchers hypothesize that because we react to silence in the same way as the sound in this trick, we actually hear the silence—rather than just infer that it exists. It seems like Simon and Garfunkel They’re on to something.
A total of 1,000 participants were recruited across seven trials. Besides one more illusion, another similar test Executed, includes periods of stillness and partial stillness that vary in how close they are to one another or how far apart they are.
Background noise such as restaurants and busy train stations was used in silence for some trials, while there was a difference in pitch in others.
Simplified imaging experiment. A: Replace silence with sound. B: Participants wore headphones, and in all trials, ambient sound was played so that the subject was completely immersed in the soundscape. A: background noise for Experiments 1 and 2. (Goh et al., PNAS2023)
Across all trials, the effect was the same: silence seemed to be processed the same way as sound. This study adds to our knowledge of how our sense of hearing works.
“The kinds of illusions and effects that seem unique to auditory sound processing are also what we get with silence, which suggests that we also actually hear the absence of sound,” He said Ian Phillips, philosopher and psychologist at Johns Hopkins University.
Lots of research Now show it Silence can be important in the perception of sound – much like the way we leave pauses between words – but until now there has been no strong experimental evidence that silence itself can act as a stimulus the brain hears.
Next, the team wanted to see how we perceive silence when it is completely separate from sound (and not embedded in it, as in this experiment). It also begs the question of whether or not we ever experience total silence, and can help treat a variety of hearing problems.
Philosophers have long debated whether silence is something we can literally perceive, but there has been no scientific research directly addressing this question. He said Chase Firestone, cognitive scientist at Johns Hopkins University.
Research published in PNAS.
2023-07-11 10:20:20
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