With as dramatic of a title I have you’d think this would be about something deep like the poverty across the world…unfortunately no. This is about rooms.
My roommate told me this evening about something called a “sensory room.” I did a quick Google search and in the 2 minutes I gave myself to look for it, couldn’t find exactly what he was talking about so I’ll have to go off of what he told me.
The basics is that he was part of experiments at the University of Texas (UT), one of which was going into this sensory room. The room was comprised of all black walls with extensive sound proofing and lead doors. They put the testers in the room, closed the lead doors and locked them in. Then the participants would stay in until they couldn’t stand it anymore and push a button to ask to come out.
Why is it that they couldn’t handle it for long at times? There are a lot of factors, but the one that my roommate talked about most extensively is the noise. He went into much more of the science than I’m equiped to talk about, but basically, the sound in this room became deafening.
How? You may ask. It was completely silent and dark. My roommate explained something about the way sound waves work concerning the frequency and amplitude. But the basic idea I got was that it was similar to how your pupils work.
Have you ever noticed when it’s extremely bright your pupils are tiny and when it’s dark they turn into practical beach balls? Your ears do something similar. The quieter it is, the more your ears hear the things that they can’t normally hear, the more they adjust and amplify these sounds.
Have you ever noticed how when you fall asleep during a movie and then wake up it sounds like someone unleashed a jet engine on your ears via the TV? Science something something…same concept.
So, the more silent, the louder things become.
What a world we live in.