Canberrans, are you getting enough silence in your lives?

Login or signup to continue reading

My latest online newsletter from Nautilus, the splendid science magazine, opens with the inquiring heading "Are you getting enough silence in your life?", going on to add "Silence is very good for you. Noise, not so much."

Then the newsletter sets about giving links galore to highly readable but science-scholarly pieces on the subjects of silence and noise.

I was able to answer the Nautilus inquiry with a resounding "Yes!" because of course this federal capital city is blessed with what seems a superabundance of silence.

This is thanks to, among other things, the little city's littleness, to an absence of heavy and noisy industry, to painstaking urban planning that spreads people (potential noisemongers) very thinly across the blessed expanse of this federal capital territory, and to our having only a shy little country-town airport never visited by any big aircraft with nasty roaring engines.

But silence is not necessarily what we think it is, the Nautilus pieces point out.

So, for example, as someone who has sometimes whinged about Canberra's surreally grave-like quiet, imagining a big city's various clamours must be more stimulating for the brain, I learn from Nautilus that I've been wrong.

Scientific studies show that quietness itself grows new cells in the hippocampus, the suburb of the brain that enables memory and learning. Our brains feed on quietude.

And in any case, Nautilus argues, perhaps there is no such thing as silence.

It points us to composer and musicologist Kyle Dann's No Such Thing As Silence, his analysis of composer John Cage's famous non-composition 4'33 (Four Minutes and Thirty-Three........

© Canberra Times