12/14/2022 0 Comments Quiet meaning![]() ![]() They named things like births and deaths and moments of awe, moments where words fail us. ![]() Leigh Marz: The answers to the question we asked, “What’s the deepest silence you’ve ever known?” helped shape this book and led us to understand that this is more than an auditory exploration-we want to look at silence beyond the absence of noise, as a presence, because our respondents noted things that were auditorily loud. The volume of their sirens is a proxy for that loudness, and over the last 100 years, fire engine alarm sirens have gotten to be six times louder than they were previously. It’s not just a little bit more auditory noise-there is a mass proliferation of mental stimulation in our world today.įire engine sirens, for example, have to be loud enough to break through the surrounding soundscape. In our research, we found that it is an empirical fact that the world is louder than it’s ever been. It’s not just a little bit more auditory noise-there is a mass proliferation of mental stimulation in our world today. But in our research, we found that it is an empirical fact that the world is louder than it’s ever been. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, the gods sent a great flood to wipe out the Earth because of all the noise that humanity was generating. About 2,500 years ago, in South Asia, people were complaining about the sounds of cymbals and gongs and street vendors. Justin Zorn: Human beings have always complained about the noise of the world. Is the time we’re living in now noisier than any other time in history? Then we look at internal noise: that which happens in our consciousness, like rumination, worry, and anxiety, which are also on the rise in these times. Then we go further into informational noise: that which is grabbing our attention, which is increasing exponentially right now, while our ability to process that information is not increasing. We do look at auditory noise that we measure in decibels and think of often as happening to our ears, and maybe to our nervous systems when it’s really loud. Leigh Marz: That question and what it provoked led us to look beyond just auditory noise. What they were describing were moments of pristine attention, where nothing was making claims on the consciousness. ![]() While some people were describing balmy mornings and sunrise over a vast ocean, other people were describing situations that sounded auditorily loud, like running the perfect line through roaring rapids, or births, or deaths, or even the 4:00 a.m. The answers surprised us because they weren’t all auditorily quiet. ![]() The article resonated with folks, and we continued to follow the bread crumbs and interview neuroscientists, poets, philosophers, someone on death row, a heavy-metal star, and a Grammy winning opera singer-all about this question of: What’s the deepest silence you’ve ever known? Leigh Marz and Justin Zorn, “The Busier You Are, the More You Need Quiet Time,” Harvard Business Review, March 17, 2017. We wrote an article for Harvard Business Review about the power of silence in a literal auditory sense, for mental clarity, our health, relationships, and the ability to generate good ideas. Justin Zorn: It’s been a surprising journey for us, discovering our definition of noise and silence. ![]()
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