Leigh Marz
speaker
48 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Leigh Marz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
One way we know that is we look to emergency sirens. So in the past hundred years, those sirens have gotten six times louder in order to cut through the noise around us. The estimates that 65% of the population, about 450 million people, live with decibel levels that are harmful to their health.
Hey, thanks for having me, Mike.
Oh, that's a great question. Well, on one level, it really is the absence of noise. And we look at it coming, the noise coming to us through our ears and through our screens in many cases, and also the noise that's just generated by our own darn minds.
But as we explore this question, the deepest silences when we asked all those interesting people, neuroscientists, politicians, artists, poets, a man incarcerated on death row, all kinds of people, we asked them that question and they pointed us
towards a deep internal silence so it's not necessarily just about what's happening outside of us although that's also a lovely type of silence but a silence internal that brings about a type of presence where we believe there can be healing and enjoyment and connection and all kinds of things and you believe that because why because you want to believe that or you have real evidence to believe that
it's not so much that we're researchers studying that but what we are doing in our work in the world is for example i work with a lot of scientists and engineers who are trying to get harmful toxic chemicals out of our products and out of our environment and they were coming at these issues these you know really complex and intractable issues in a certain way in the four walls of their offices and under fluorescent lighting and all these things but we took them out into the redwoods and really contemplating these issues
with big open space and open calendars and no Wi-Fi. And they really came to some novel thinking, breakthrough thinking. So really time and time and again, I am seeing the results of people tapping into silence, connecting with one another in a different way to come through that breakthrough thinking.
Yeah, the taxonomy of noise we take on in this, and we could take on visual and things like that, but we kept it to auditory noise, that which happens in our ears and the decibel levels, which has been exponentially on the rise, in case you're wondering, and the research really does bear that out.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, it feels like it's getting louder and it really is getting louder. So one way we know that is we look to emergency sirens as a proxy indicator for the surrounding environments, because of course they need to cut through the din in order to get our attention.
So in the past hundred years, to your point, it's been gradual, but those sirens have gotten six times louder in order to cut through the noise around us. And we do a better job measuring decibel levels in Europe overall than we do in the United States.
But the estimates from the World Health Organization is that 65% of the population, about 450 million people, live with decibel levels that are harmful to their health. So on that auditory level, it is definitely getting louder. But we also thought it was important to look at information. So
In 2010, the past CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, estimated that every two days we listen to as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization to 2003. So we are taking in the study show about five times as much information as we did just a generation ago. So there's just this overwhelming amount of information being generated and that we're trying to take in on a day-to-day basis.
And that, we believe, actually increases our internal chatter, our internal noise. So Ethan Cross, a professor at the University of Michigan, estimates that we listen to something like 320 State of the Union addresses of internal compressed speech every day.
So our concern is with all this auditory, informational, and internal noise that we're really not able to tune into what is most important to us in our lives, our relationships, our work, and our purpose for being here.
We know this through different studies which look at not just the harm that comes to us in the ears, you know, certainly hearing loss is a serious issue that can lead to isolation and things, but it actually is also tied to cardiovascular disease, to diabetes, to loss of sleep and all of the downstream effects of loss of sleep as well. So there's a lot of science coming out.
Initially, we looked at silence as more of a control variable. So the other side of that is the benefits of silence. So it used to be that silence was sort of where we considered a baseline to return to.
But now it's actually showing in all these studies where they look at different inputs, say, like pup sounds, or music, classical music, or silence as a control variable, or so on, that silence actually leads to growth of neurons in the brain in the hippocampus in the area associated with memory.
Yeah, I had that experience also walking into my brother's sound studio, and I noticed it wasn't just like what was happening in my ears, but what it was happening in my nervous system. I just felt calmer. So it is a delicious experience to try to seek out if you can. Not all of us have a sound studio or an anechoic chamber available to us, but those who have really report to
That being an extraordinary experience of sound being so different. The refracted sounds are being absorbed in those rooms. That's why it's so different.
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