Study: Silence Can Be ‘Heard’ And Distort One’s Perception Of Time

Silence can not only be heard, but it can also shift the perception of time, according to a team of philosophers and psychologists who tested 1,000 people with auditory illusions. An auditory illusion, like an optical illusion, occurs when a listener ‘hears’ sounds that should not be conceivable given the circumstances under which they were formed.

‘We typically think of our sense of hearing as being concerned with sounds. But silence, whatever it is, is not a sound – it’s the absence of sound,” said lead author Rui Zhe Goh, a graduate student in philosophy and psychology, at Johns Hopkins University, US.

”Surprisingly, what our work suggests is that nothing is also something you can hear,” said Zhe Goh.

The scientists modified well-known auditory illusions for this investigation, such as the ‘one-is-more’ illusion, in which participants have been observed to find one long beep longer than two short successive beeps even when the two sequences were equally long.

They inverted these illusions, creating soundscapes that depicted the din from crowded places such as popular restaurants, marketplaces, and train stations with brief moments of calm.

”Our approach was to ask whether our brains treat silences the way they treat sounds. If you can get the same illusions with silences as you get with sounds, then that may be evidence that we literally hear silence after all,” said Chaz Firestone, an assistant professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, who directs the Johns Hopkins Perception & Mind Laboratory.

The researchers discovered the same findings: participants perceived one lengthy moment of stillness to be longer than two brief moments of silence.

Other silence illusions produced the same results as sound illusions, the researchers reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The researchers said that the notion was not merely that these silences caused people to experience illusions, but that the same illusions that scientists thought could only be induced by sounds functioned just as well when the sounds were substituted by silences.

”The kinds of illusions and effects that look like they are unique to the auditory processing of a sound, we also get them with silences, suggesting we really do hear absences of sound too,” said co-author Ian Phillips, professor of Philosophy and Psychological and Brain Sciences.

The findings create a new method for studying the sense of absence, according to the research, which plans to investigate visual disappearances and other examples of objects individuals can experience as missing.

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