Silence is golden for the brain

2023-09-06 10:00:01

De back from vacation, the first shock in town is the noise. He is everywhere, follows you and does not leave you, wherever you go. In the street, in public places, in public transport, in the supermarket, very early in the morning and until late at night, you cannot get rid of it, the sounds overwhelm you. You understand then that, during your holidays, you have undoubtedly savored above all… the silence.

For Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge, silence may simply be the greatest luxury of today. And, in fact, ambient noise might be responsible for many evils. Thus, there are many studies that demonstrate the harmful effects of noise on our mental, physical and cognitive health.

Conversely, silence would be able to reduce our blood pressure, our heart rate and our level of cortisol, and therefore of stress. Despite this data, which clearly underlines the beneficial effects of silence, many of us can no longer bear to sit still, in silence, with only our thoughts for company.

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In 2014, in a series of studies, Timothy Wilson of the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia and his colleagues found that students did not like ” to reflect on “ in silence, alone in a room. Being isolated, in a quiet room, with their own thoughts for fifteen minutes was apparently so aversive that it prompted many participants to administer an electric shock to themselves which they had previously found so unpleasant that they would have paid to avoid it! This shows how difficult it is for us to accept being alone with ourselves.

Nicholas Buttrick took up the experiments of his colleague Timothy Wilson, in 2018, with subjects from no less than eleven different countries. The edifying results clearly show that the majority of participants prefer to engage in any activity rather than doing nothing, in silence. Watching television or rushing to your phone thus appear to be much more pleasant activities than turning to yourself to think alone.

Best ally of the brain

However, savoring the silence, evoking pleasant memories or projecting oneself towards future events might, in principle, induce positive affects. But that’s not all. Silence might just be our brain’s best ally.

Imke Kirste and his colleagues at the Center for Research on Regenerative Therapies in Dresden (Germany) made a surprising discovery while studying the effect of sound context on the brain of mice. These were divided into different groups and were exposed to a standard noise from the animal facility (control condition), to white noise (created randomly by combining all the sound frequencies simultaneously), to the call of puppies, to the Sonata for two pianos in D major, K448, by Mozart as well as silence. The researchers measured the number of new nerve cells in the hippocampus, an area well known for its involvement in memory and spatial identification.

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