The Sound of Silence in the Brain
Isn’t it interesting that you know what I’m talking about in the headline, and yet, the very definition of silence is that it doesn’t have sound?
I don’t remember what I was reading or how old I was the first time I read that silence “rang” in a character’s ears, but it stuck with me. Perhaps it was the first time I associated silence with having a sound, whereas before, I associated it with having no sound at all. I remember searching for silence after reading that to see if I could hear the “silence ring” in my ears, but silence isn’t easy to find when you’re growing up in a family of six within a city.
Apparently, I’m not the only one who’s ever been curious about silence. Neuroscientists, it turns out, have many questions about how silence works in the brain and have searched for ways to study it — which is challenging, to say the least. Still, experts have two primary questions regarding how the brain processes silence. Do our brains “hear” silence like we can hear the birds chirping outside? Or is silence merely a place marker the brain inserts between sounds that we perceive as silence?
Both of these questions have one thing in common — perception. So, that’s what experts decided to focus on.
