Chapter 5 Silence in an age of distraction

Patrick Shen

Any modern person with a healthy set of ears can attest to the scarcity of silence. The silence which once blanketed nearly every aspect of our lives – and was intimately linked to survival for our ancestors – has long been replaced by the sound of industry and transportation. Nearly 150 years of rapid technological growth void of any real checks and balances in regard to the health impacts of its ever-expanding sonic footprint has ensured that this silence will likely never return. Some may be skeptical of the actual costs associated with living in a world without silence. Others may suggest that the advantages which technological innovation brings far outweigh the benefits of silence. Perhaps they are right on some level. Regardless, I am less interested in pitting technology against silence than I am in exploring the ways in which the two can co-exist. More fundamental to that, a case must be made for the restoration of silence into the fabric of our experience. For once silence and the gravity of its vanishing is understood, perhaps then may we devise methods to restore and protect that silence for future generations.

What do we mean by silence anyway? One could easily fill an entire volume on the slippery nature of this word alone. For those of us in the Western world, the word silence is often associated with the cessation of sound or noise. The silence between speech, between two notes of music, or the silence that falls on the battlefield after the last shot is fired. Indeed, there are aspects of this notion of silence which offer an important dimension to the way we navigate experience, aspects that are under threat today. These spaces give definition to and inform our experience. If not for the pause in someone’s speech, for example, we would not be afforded the time to reflect and form a proper response. Yet in the modern era, for each momentary pause in the soundtrack of our lives, there is something in nearly every instance – from elevator music to nervous finger tapping – designed to replace it. In this age of rapid-fire communication, silences between speech have become “awkward.” In fact, just three to four seconds of silence for the average English speaker is what it takes for verbal exchanges to get awkward according to Michael Handford, professor of linguistics at the University of Tokyo.¹ Whether it’s an um, ah, or a comment about the weather, we feel compelled to fill the silence with something, anything to avoid the discomfort a break in conversation brings. Indeed, fast and frequent talkers find themselves garnering more attention than their slower counterparts, increasing in power and influence as the meeting goes on. Not only does the nearly continuous speech directed toward us demand our attention, those on the receiving end even consider these fast talkers more intelligent, more likable, and even better looking. “All of this would be fine if more talking were correlated with greater insight,” Susan Cain (2013) writes in her best-selling book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, “but research suggests that there is no such link.”

In the same way that artists and photographers use negative space to give shape and definition to their subjects, silence has a way of setting one thing apart from another. It is in this space in which we engage with what came before and anticipate what comes next. Without the ceasing of one note we cannot anticipate the delight of the subsequent note when enjoying a favorite piece of music. Without a break in conversation, we cannot reflect and form a thoughtful response, and move a conversation forward in a fruitful manner.

While many of our commonly shared notions of silence may suggest that it is more to do with an absence of something, scientists, philosophers, theologians, and writers through the ages have found plenty to say about what is contained by this word, paradoxically leaving us with volumes upon volumes of literature exploring the complexities of this ineffable concept. The seventeenth-century Spanish mystic Miguel de Molinos distinguished three degrees of silence related to our everyday experience: silence of the mouth, silence of the mind, and silence of the will. For the American composer John Cage, silence had more to do with an awakening of sorts, as he referred to it as “a change of mind, a turning around.” As for acoustic silence, after a life-altering experience inside a soundproof room in which he heard only the sounds of his own body, Cage famously concluded that there is in fact “no such thing as silence.” In his book The Way of the Heart, Theologian Henri Nouwen speaks of an ancient silence with more existential implications which he gleans from the teachings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers of third-century Egypt. Nouwen writes, “In the sayings of the Desert Fathers, we can distinguish three aspects of silence. First, silence makes us pilgrims. Secondly, silence guards the fire within. Thirdly, silence teaches us to speak.” For Nouwen, words were an instrument of the present while silence was “the mystery of the future world,” in which words are no longer necessary. If the proliferation of words which continue to “form the floors, the walls, and ceilings of our existence,” as Nouwen wrote back in 1981, is any indication, the future world clearly remains elusive.

Many have understood this paradox of examining silence through words and have attempted in numerous other ways to explore the varied dimensions of silence. Religiously devout men and women have spent lifetimes bathing in silence in order to, as Nouwen might say, bridge this world with the future world. Painters like Robert Rauschenberg and Ad Reinhardt have explored nothingness by stripping their processes of all technique, offering us “blank” white and black canvases. An essay is not the place for a deep investigation of these ideas which speak to the deepest aspects of the human experience and that are perhaps best understood through experience itself. What I’m sure becomes glaringly apparent to the reader is that silence is more than what we have been led to believe and when considered in the aforementioned ways is evidently much more inclusive than exclusive. Put another way, silence has much to say to those willing to listen.

It is this expansive, transcendental element of this vast subject which I found most intriguing when in 2012 I set out to make a feature-length film to investigate silence further. Aware of the inherent paradox in using images and sounds to paint a picture of silence, I was only interested in adopting a cinematic language which would embody the subject and invite viewers into an experience of silence rather than attempt to demystify it. As I began to imagine a film which would embody silence, it quickly became apparent the challenges I’d face in attempting to give form to a formless material or concept, to demystify that which is the embodiment of mystification itself. When considering the film’s soundtrack, I wondered if there should be any sound at all. If I were to make a purely silent film, stripped entirely of a soundtrack, wouldn’t then the subjects I chose to photograph and the juxtaposition of those images express something of me rather than of silence? In every scenario I imagined, I found myself imposing my own artistic sensibilities upon silence. Making matters more problematic, the mountain of books and decades of highly revered works of art devoted to this very subject elevated silence to that of something sacred, way beyond the reach of the intellectualizing and demystifying that most documentaries are known for.

As the Japanese would suggest, the shape and personality of the silence we encounter draw their identity from our surroundings, our past experiences, our memories, and even our emotional state. Hushed voices gently reverberating through the halls of a museum heard just moments after you’ve waited in line outside amidst a cacophony of the bustling city, may instantly calm the nerves and quiet the mind while someone who’s seen too many horror films may find the dead quiet of a cemetery rather unsettling. The characteristics of the silence one experiences depends wholly on the individual; where she has been and how she is feeling factor directly into the unique shape of one’s encounter with silence. And so I began to ponder my own journey with silence for some clues. I thought about the existential yearnings of my adolescence which sparked my journey inward. The theater listing in the newspaper that led to my visiting a movie theater one afternoon in 2007 to see Into Great Silence the beautiful film by Philip Groning. The words of authors, filmmakers and poets like Max Picard, Nathaniel Dorsky, Mary Oliver, Rainer Maria Rilke, Henry David Thoreau, John Cage, and Pico Iyer, to name a few. Those who write in a manner that embodies silence rather than attempts to demystify it. Then there was the music of John Cage and others like Arvo Part who treat silence as a collaborator rather than a space with which to fill their egos. It appeared that my own journey into silence had been informed and fueled by experiences unique to me, experiences which gave me insight, context, and the freedom to explore the spaces in-between. What I eventually discovered was that silence and sound were inextricably tied to one another and that silence was intimately connected to one’s experience in the world.

One begins to see now, I hope, the grand implications of silence and that silence – at least of a particular variety – can bring immeasurable value to the human experience. In fact, one might say that it is integral to the human experience. Further, one should begin to see that if this silence continues to be engulfed by the noise of the modern world, we stand to lose an aspect of our humanity. How bad is the noise problem? Noise has become so pervasive in our lives, it’s hardly noticed. We have somehow been convinced that shouting at our dinner companions just to be heard amidst a cacophony of background music, voices, and the screech of chairs dragged across hard reflective surfaces is a sure sign that we have “come to the right place.” It’s no wonder why friends gathered around a table with heads down buried in their devices is such a common sight now. Shouting is exhausting. The social implications of noise aside, the World Health Organization has ranked noise pollution the second most hazardous environmental toxin – just below air pollution – elevating noise to a legitimate health concern. It’s no longer a matter of annoyance or impaired concentration when the neighbor’s stereo is too loud. Nearly half a century of research on the deleterious health effects of noise undeniably establishes noise as a serious danger to children’s cognitive development and our health, leading to, among others, a host of cardiovascular problems.²

With all the wonderful things that technological innovation has brought us, we’ve also inherited a host of social, political, environmental, and spiritual challenges that have altered the very fabric of being human.

We needn’t look too far back to gain some perspective on how we got here. In the years between the late 1800s and the mid-1900s – an era which Aldous Huxley would refer to as “The Age of Noise” – the world had seen more technological and scientific innovation than all the previous centuries combined. Between the proliferation of the automobile, commercial air travel, radio, television, and amplified rock’n’roll, people were introduced to a barrage of sounds the world hadn’t seen or heard before in their everyday lives. The twentieth century also marked the first time we experienced the horrors – and noise – of a large-scale global war made possible by the mass production of military hardware, one of the many fruits of the Technological Revolution. It wasn’t just physical noise Huxley warned us against 75 years ago however. New varieties of “mental noise” were also introduced into our collective psyches via these advances in technology. For the first time in history, sounds – and the often commercially driven messages they carried with them – could be beamed into homes from miles away over the airwaves and, thanks to the telephone, those previously separated by geography could connect in an instant and converse in the same casual fashion as they did face-to-face. The entire world from which we drew our identity accelerated and expanded by leaps and bounds virtually overnight inflicting humanity with a new disease which writer and futurist Alvin Toffler termed “future shock,” a psychobiological condition he described as a “dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future” (1970, p. 11).

Anyone alive today who has ever tried to do anything can attest to the dizzying state we find ourselves in. The reader of this essay need only tally up the number of disruptions she’s encountered thus far while reading this book. Whether a leaf blower, the dings and whooshes of a smartphone, the relentless click-bait of our social media echo chamber, or the incessant inner dialogue about what’s for dinner, this modern age appears to be marked less by its innovations than the deleterious effects of those innovations. Urban dwellers seem to exist in a nearly constant elevated state, triggering a host of responses within the nervous system once designed to pool certain bodily resources to help navigate a threat to life and limb. And what of the writer of this essay? Unforeseen forces seem to keep taking a hold of me as I write this and strange lapses in consciousness perforate the process. What I seem to experience each time my mind is redirected from the task at hand is more akin to a hypnotic state of sorts as I’m often unable to recall where my mind had gone exactly. It’s no different than sleeping really. Except actual sleep is a restorative process whereas this constant deluge of stimuli and reactivity is causing stress to our bodies not to mention killing our productivity. As I attempt to retrace my actions, I’m not exactly surprised by what I find but I do feel disappointed that I had so unwittingly fell into this trance that is so prevalent in modern life. What came between me and the task at hand is probably what comes between you and what you’d prefer to be doing on many occasions. A handful of emails that require my “immediate” attention, a string of text messages which required my brain to shift cognitive gears each time; the constant dings, whooshes, and pings beckoning you to engage and respond.

Just as the need for knowledge spawned the digital age, attention is the new commodity driving innovation and the new axis upon which our world spins. Now that so much of our lives take place in the virtual space, industries are pouring millions of dollars into understanding the rhythms and psychological underpinnings of what drives us to click and keep clicking. Building off the research of behavioral scientists employed by advertising agencies in the mid-twentieth century, industries battling it out in the attention economy are employing hundreds of engineers and designers to dictate our every move in the digital space. Things like reward, punishment, aversive stimulation, and ingratiation are just some of the strategies directly linked to the core principles behind the persuasive design employed to create popular online platforms.

If you’ve read this far, bravo to you. That’s more than most, who according to studies only read about 20 percent of the text on the page before getting pulled away by the next ding or whoosh.³ What is the actual cost of these momentary lapses in attention? In the new field of “interruption science” researchers have found that the average worker switches tasks every three minutes and once distracted, needs approximately a half-hour to effectively reorient their attention back onto the original task.⁴ Those interruptions and the subsequent recovery time now take up 28 percent of a worker’s day, according to business research firm Basex. For a species which seems to prize its intellectual ability, there is surprisingly little time and space in our lives, homes, and workplaces to actually think. “By fragmenting and diffusing our powers of attention,” says Maggie Jackson (2010), author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, “we are undermining our capacity to thrive in a complex, ever-shifting world.”

It’s not just our work lives that suffer from this “dizzying disorientation.” With so much of our human sensibilities and rhythms now being driven by mechanical and technological devices, we have begun to adopt new rhythms which exceed our human limits and transfer technological expectations to areas of our lives which are not technical. “When we come home at the end of the day, it may not be just work we bring with us, but also our high-speed frustrations and electronic expectations,” says Stephen Bertman, author of Hyperculture: The Human Cost of Speed (1998, p. 8). “In short,” Bertman continues,

The modern phenomenon of declining relationship satisfaction⁵ and increasing reports of isolation and loneliness⁶ all seem to boil down to one thing in this author’s opinion: mental noise brought on by an accelerated lifestyle we simply can’t keep up with.

If you’re not convinced, try spending 20 minutes doing nothing in a relatively quiet space like a library or empty church. Or better yet, get yourself to an anechoic chamber. An anechoic chamber is an acoustically constructed room designed with painstaking effort to be nearly soundproof. Those who own them pride themselves on how quiet their rooms can get, some of them vying for the distinction of being the quietest place on earth. Orfield Labs in Minneapolis, Minnesota with their rating of −13 decibels held the record for a number of years. Microsoft’s audio lab in Redmond, Washington now holds the record with a rating of −20 decibels, approximately three decibels shy of the level of sound made when air molecules bounce off of one another. Of course, the human ear isn’t capable of experiencing such low levels of sound. In fact, the majority of people even with perfect hearing are unable to detect sounds that measure below zero decibels, the human threshold of hearing. I visited several of these rooms during the making of my film In Pursuit of Silence – including Orfield Labs – and it’s remarkable what rises to the surface when the white noise of the external world is removed from the soundtrack of our experience. Even in zero decibels of silence, the dings and whooshes find a way to persist. If not the sound of blood flowing through your veins or your tinnitus – that ringing auditory residue in your ears that millions of modern people suffer from – you’ll most certainly encounter what writer Tim Parks calls, “The interminable fizz of anxious thoughts or the self-regarding monologue” made up of thoughts that are “destructive in their insistent revisiting of where we’ve been a thousand times before.” Inner speech researchers estimate that we spend approximately 25 percent – roughly 4 hours – of our day talking to ourselves at the rate of about 4,000 words per minute or ten times faster than verbal speech.⁷ According to that math, we’re engaging in the outer-world equivalent of 40 hours of conversation with ourselves every day. Just as the words we exchange with others can easily slip into idle chatter, so too can our inner dialogue. “And if the unspoken words of our mind’s endless, idiot monologue are counted,” suggests a rather cynical Aldous Huxley, “the majority for idleness becomes, for the most of us, overwhelmingly large” (1945, pp. 216–217).

The concern over distractions is nothing new of course. Around 400 BCE Socrates lamented that the advent of writing and the Greek alphabet would diminish the mind. The invention of the printing press in 1440 spawned similar warnings of a mass information overload that would weaken our memory as books would release us from the responsibility of remembering things. The level of distractions available today however have reached a level of sophistication rivaled only by the sophistication of the technology which has spawned it. Today 5 billion people around the globe carry a pocket-sized computer millions of times more powerful than the world’s first computers making it both a technological marvel and tool of mass distraction. As we are beginning to see, the ripple effects of those distractions have far-reaching consequences. For technology ethicist James Williams, it is the cumulative impact of distractions that should have us all concerned. “In the short term,” Williams says (2018, pp. xi–xii), “distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do” while in the longer term, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation.”

How will we escape the dizzying effect of this accelerated path we find ourselves on now, the path toward what we may call an “Age of Mental Noise”? What role does silence play in helping us to deal with the rising tide of mental noise and disorientation? If we are to break out of this “future shock” and find ourselves firmly seated back in the driver’s seat of human progress, we must find a way back to silence. For as long as our technological innovation is driven by commercial interests and our daily actions continue to devolve into idle responses to the noise around us, our heads will continue to spin, unable to effectively deal with the challenges of the modern world and the continued exponential growth we’re sure to see.

With so much vying both externally and internally for our attention, it’s no wonder why we have forgotten all about the silence missing from our daily experience. To quote from a letter I recently received from my friend, writer and poet Jonathan Simons, “One can only imagine what else might exist if we peeled our hands away from the gears of these image making machinery.” What does the world even sound like beneath all the noise, the disorientation? I wouldn’t dare suggest that I know what it sounds like for you exactly – that’s up to silence to determine – but I imagine that person you meet there is probably the most authentic version of yourself you’ll find anywhere else. If Pico Iyer is right when he says, “Silence is where we hear something deeper than our chatter,” and “Where we speak something deeper than our words,”⁸ I think we owe it to ourselves and each other to quiet the mental noise to explore whether we can see the path more clearly.

In the anechoic chamber, I did experience some momentary respite from the mental noise eventually. When I did, I encountered a part of my being I hadn’t seen in some time. It was awkward at first, like seeing an old friend with whom you’ve exchanged a few emails but have had little three-dimensional contact. It was the part of me that is content with who he is and with life as it is lived as opposed to the spectacle we engage in each day. The “house of mirrors,” as my wise friend Jonathan Simons suggests we’ll be able to “pull ourselves in and out of” so long as we “maintain familiarity with what’s real.” This part of me I encountered in the chamber is also quieter, able to resist the need to fill my consciousness with narrative, content with simply engaging with the world in the spaces between the dings and whooshes, and open to the lessons those encounters may hold for me. It didn’t require any sophisticated or exotic technique to get there. It did take time and some effort to shift my attention away from the noise, but I became convinced that with time and practice, I could learn to quiet the “interminable fizz” in perhaps any environment or situation and eventually move from the occasional encounter with silence to more prolonged engagements.

Our collective disorientation is intimately wrapped up in our treating technology as a lifeline rather than a useful tool. If we continue to allow our online existence to inform the offline one and surrender our natural rhythms to that of our machines, this dizzying enchantment will persist as if it is our only option. The house of mirrors is tempting and vast, but with an ear toward silence we stand a better chance at breaking free from the allure of its reflections.

Notes

References

Bertman, S. (1998). Hyperculture: The Human Cost of Speed. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Cain, S. (2013). Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. London: Broadway Books.
Huxley, A. (1945). The Perennial Philosophy. London: Harper & Brothers.
Jackson, M. (2010). Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.
Nouwen, H. J. (1981). The Way of the Heart. New York: Ballantine Books.
Toffler, A. (1970). Future Shock. New York: Random House.
Williams, J. (2018). Stand out of the Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.