In a remote and quiet place, Vikman says, she discovers thoughts and feelings that aren’t audible in her busy daily life. “If you want to know yourself you have to be with yourself, and discuss with yourself, be able to talk with yourself.”
I was a homemaker for years. A lot of housework is fairly mindless, allowing for uninterrupted deep thought because most folks will not bother you while you are doing laundry. They don't want to be asked to help.
I have spent years cultivating a relatively quiet life by American standards. Since my ex moved out, I mostly have not had a TV. I gave up my car years ago, giving up its built in radio along with it. In my household, it is a common courtesy to announce "I am starting up a video (or game) with voices." so as to not startle anyone.
People complain a lot about the stress of our 24/7 always on lives in the US. They often lay the blame on computers, smart phones, email notifications and social media. I have a smart phone and computers. I don't feel harried and interrupted and like I can't get a break.
My life was quiet before sleeping in a tent for nearly 6 years, but doing that deepened the quiet. I am prone to ear infections. I can't wear headphones because of it. My days were spent in a library. My nights were spent trying to be quiet enough to go unnoticed and not have the cops called on me. Games were often played with the sound off.
Peace and quiet is necessary to be able to hear yourself think. I think the degree to which constant noise interferes with deep contemplation and self reflection goes largely unrecognized.
A lot of people could probably skip therapy entirely if they could just arrange to hear themselves think. But I think many people are intentionally avoiding that because the constant flak of noise obscuring their thoughts and feelings is critical to their ability to stay in a relationship that doesn't work or at a job they actually hate.
Hearing their own opinions about their own lives would likely compel many of them to make hard decisions and big changes and they would rather not know. That's scary. It's overwhelming. The noise that enables remaining stuck is like an anaesthetic.
> A lot of people could probably skip therapy entirely if they could just arrange to hear themselves think.
I'm sure you aren't completely implying this but as someone who went through therapy and attended group classes where I encountered dozens of people with significantly worse forms of anxiety, there are a lot of people whose problem IS their thoughts.
Negative thoughts are capable of preventing people from doing even basic things like talking to a friendly stranger, washing dishes, or even getting out of bed to do a routine. It akin to having poor eye sight and being forced to wear a broken pair of glasses. Those thoughts completely change the perspective of the world, sap energy, and foster incredibly awful feelings. And I think without guidance, it's easy to get into a loop where thoughts can pull a person into a deeper darkness.
I personally find it much easier to be with my thoughts now that a lot of my life has changed for the better, but there's no way I think I could've done it without my therapist. I needed someone to be my champion, to be a voice that could counter my inner critic, to build my confidence before I had the capacity to challenge the beliefs that constantly prevented me from doing things that brought fulfillment.
I have a slightly different perspective on thoughts. To me, they are by-products of what’s going on in the very vast sub conscious mind, and an indicator of what is going on down there. They are information, but not a means to an end. It’s like listening to noises at night - it can be beautiful at times, but at some time I just want to concentrate on other things that matter to me. I find them too volatile to provide deep self reflection on their own (so just listening to thoughts is not of much use), and it’s hard to have an inner dialogue because auditive memory is not available, so you get stuck debating with yourself in circles. (Might be just me, of course)
When I work, or talk to other people, I don’t hear any thoughts, and I think this is because the speech-building parts of the brain are preoccupied with the task at hand.
And if I talk to people, I often hear myself saying things I had not thought of before. I’m not in therapy, but I’m sure it would work way better for me than just thinking. Real talk definitely beats thoughts by a wide margin in clarity and expressiveness.
I definitely need silence for downtime though, I love staying up late alone for that reason.
Sounds a lot like Thich Nhat Hanh's approach (Miracle of Mindfulness) :)
While washing the dishes one should only be washing the dishes, which means that while washing the dishes one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes. At first glance this might seem a little silly: why put so much stress on a simple thing? But that's precisely the point. The fact that I am standing there and washing these bowls is a wondrous reality. I'm being completely myself, following my breath, conscious of my presence, and conscious of my thoughts and actions. There's no way I can be tossed around mindlessly like a bottle slapped here and there on the waves.
> The noise that enables remaining stuck is like an anaesthetic.
Thanks for this comment. I almost always listen to music while working, or to online noise generators. Your statement hits the nail on the head – it's an addiction to distract yourself into a pleasant dullness, and I've been blissfully ignoring it as such.
> A lot of people could probably skip therapy entirely if they could just arrange to hear themselves think.
I tend to agree, but it may take time to see therapeutic effects. That initial period of quieting, at least for me, through meditation, was more chaotic than the noise. It turned everything upside down, everything I thought I’d known about myself was pretty much wrong. I’d just been telling myself stories for years and when I stopped listening and believing they were the truth - wow. I don’t think you necessarily need to have anything external change in your life for it to be a big adjustment.
It's great being able to get outside in the relative quiet. Maybe a walk at the beach, or in a forest, or on a hike in the hills. Maybe even a drive if you enjoy drives out of the city. Etc.
There isn't anything quite like it. But unfortunately many people seem to forget that we are able to do this.
(Off-topic: why did you change your HN account? Both your profiles link to your websites that feature the same name (so if it was for a privacy reason, you might do well to clean out your old profile), and you didn't take time off between your last post on your previous account and your first post on your new account. I only noticed because you are a frequent and recognizable commenter here on HN.)
American culture of making noise and hyping is tiring and annoying at times.
Sports events are the most prominent example. Going to popular sports matches in the US: football, ice hockey, basketball, etc. and you'll be bombarded with ads, noise, hype from the loudspeakers and flashing lights from the huge screens -- every single second you're there. When you watch the Super Bowl, you watch more ads than you watch the game. Going to a soccer game which is the most popular sport outside of the US, the only sound you'll ever hear is when the fans actually make noise. And perhaps, the announcement when they substitute players. By the way, it's quite cool to be in a high-stakes soccer match: There are volunteering leaders emerging from the crowd that orchestrate the people naturally. Noise in sports events are great, but only when they are not from the stupid flashing screens.
It's not a surprise to me that the laugh tracks were invented in America. Their presence in modern American sitcoms is annoying at best. But now, I think the producers started to realize that.
I think we are happier when we're treated like adults who know how to feel and behave.
What you said reminds me a lot of what David Foster Wallace once said in an interview:
"No, it's um... I mean, there's a difference, though, I think, between being mildly bored and but then there's another kind of boredom that I think you're talking about which is um: reading, reading requires sitting alone, by yourself, in a quiet room. And I have friends, intelligent friends, who don't like to read because they get - it's not just bored - there's an almost dread that comes up, I think, here about having to be alone and having to be quiet. And you see that when you walk in. When you walk into most public spaces in America it isn't quiet anymore; they pipe music through. And the music's easy to make fun of 'cause it's usually really horrible music. But it seems significant that we don't want things to be quiet, ever, anymore. And, to me, I don't, I don't know that I can defend it, but that seems to me to have something to do with when you feel like the purpose of your life is to gratify yourself and get things for yourself and go all the time, there's this other part of you that's the same part that can kind of, is almost hungry for silence and quiet and thinking really hard about the same thing for maybe half an hour instead of thirty seconds, that doesn't get fed at all. And it makes itself felt in the body in a kind of dread, in here. And I don't know whether that makes a whole lot of sense. But I think it's true that here in the US, every year the culture gets more and more hostile - and I don't mean hostile like angry - just, it becomes more and more difficult to ask people to read, or to look at a piece of art for an hour, or to listen, to listen to a piece of music that's complicated and that takes work to understand, because - well, there are a lot of reasons - but, particularly now in the computer and internet culture everything's so fast, and the faster things go the more we feed that part of ourselves but don't feed the part of ourselves that likes, that likes quiet, that can live in quiet, you know, that can live without any kind of stimulation. I don't know."
Aren't the players literally wearing advertisements in those sports? I find that hard on the eyes, personally. (I realize some US sports do this. Nascar comes to mind.)
I don’t go to sports matches very often in any country, but the american habit of yell-talking when dining out at a restaurant ruins most dinners out in the US for me. That, and televisions in establishments in which they are entirely inappropriate.
Another thing is advertisement pollution. Just notice it when going around in some bigger cities. Ads everywhere, shouting at you and not letting you to rest. Even if you don't look at them, they are still there, talking to you.
I agree. Pollution (visual, auditory and environmental) will be a serious problem in this century. This constant stimulation plus the daily stress can't be good for our mental health long term.
I was in Salvador, Brazil this summer and was disgusted by how loud everything was, people on the streets carrying speakers playing music, street sellers screaming, cars honking, I prefer the relative quietness of my southern Chile.
Salvador is the capital of the Bahia a state of Brazil. The city has almost 3 millions of people, and it is know for its famous Carnaval parties in the summer. What were you hoping for? A silence place?
I could be far off base here, but I wonder if this could be tied to why humans are generally considered more capable of learning in adolescence - the older someone gets, the more noise they find around them. Lecturers' voices, phones ringing, music, cars and the like are all things you hear progressively more after age 3 or so.
Lewis Black, a comedian, couches his praise of noise in a cynical one-liner, noting dryly, “The reason I live in New York City is because it’s the loudest city on the planet Earth. It’s so loud I never have to listen to any of the shit that’s going on in my own head.”
> Here’s how Kirste made sense of the results. She knew that “environmental enrichment,” like the introduction of toys or fellow mice, encouraged the development of neurons because they challenged the brains of mice. Perhaps the total absence of sound may have been so artificial, she reasoned—so alarming, even—that it prompted a higher level of sensitivity or alertness in the mice. Neurogenesis could be an adaptive response to uncanny quiet.
Just a word of caution: Experiments that work in mice don’t necessarily work in humans [1]. These findings are very preliminary, although interesting.
Taking this another level, and, where I thought the article was originally going, there is an internal dialog going on even with external silence. An aspect of vipassana meditation (and probably others) is when that internal noise silences.
That's what I was expecting as well. What Landmark folk call the voice in your head. Which is always interpreting, telling stories, and so on. It's often hard to hear what other people are saying, because that inner voice is so loud. But with practice, it eventually shuts up, most of the time.
During silence, the brain consolidates, much as muscles strengthen after exertion, not during.
This consolidation consists in making information fit together "better", by seeking patterns and other redundancies - resulting in both compression and insight. A role also assigned to sleep.
It's more basic than intellectual consolidation, but things like the concept of a chair. (Not the philosphical concept of a chair, but some particular person's actual concept).
But it also explains why we have spontaneous insight when disengaged, e.g. in the shower.
I feel like this can't be said enough. Various kinds of minimalism, which are really just different ways of being left in peace, are now pleasures that are only reachable by the privileged classes. So of course these pleasures find a lot of enthusiasm here. Not that I'm any less enthusiastic than most here, but we shouldn't forget that out industry contains some of the worst offenders when it comes to distraction and interruption.
"...and a vibrant cultural capital the size of Nashville, Tennessee..." ahh yes, as a finn, I know all the us cities/states and their size and instantly compare finnish cities to us counterparts. Indeed I do sir.
I do a lot of meditation and trance work, and I can say that trance is all about training yourself to ignore things that demand your attention. Both the body and the mind will issue such demands.
Stimulation becomes a "resource," one that you want to get rid of as fast as you gather it. But the easiest way to get rid of it is to not gather it in the first place.
As you get deeper into trance, other things you're not so skilled at ignoring start to make themselves known. You need to learn how to ignore those too. Otherwise you just don't have a whole lot of fun.
The brain can ignore practically anything. Many psychological disorders involve the brain not being able to ignore things that most people can ignore, such as OCD or tinnitus. If I'm in a weird state, tinnitus can become really awful. But most of the time it's not a thing. I submit that 90% of tinnitus cases could be solved with some guided meditation, and 9% of the other 10% needs the attention of a TMJ specialist. Maybe 10% of 10%.
I went to Target when they (briefly) came to Canada and was surprised and delighted by the absence of music in the store. I'm sure some people were weirded out by that, but I found it refreshing and peaceful.
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|8 years ago|reply
I was a homemaker for years. A lot of housework is fairly mindless, allowing for uninterrupted deep thought because most folks will not bother you while you are doing laundry. They don't want to be asked to help.
I have spent years cultivating a relatively quiet life by American standards. Since my ex moved out, I mostly have not had a TV. I gave up my car years ago, giving up its built in radio along with it. In my household, it is a common courtesy to announce "I am starting up a video (or game) with voices." so as to not startle anyone.
People complain a lot about the stress of our 24/7 always on lives in the US. They often lay the blame on computers, smart phones, email notifications and social media. I have a smart phone and computers. I don't feel harried and interrupted and like I can't get a break.
My life was quiet before sleeping in a tent for nearly 6 years, but doing that deepened the quiet. I am prone to ear infections. I can't wear headphones because of it. My days were spent in a library. My nights were spent trying to be quiet enough to go unnoticed and not have the cops called on me. Games were often played with the sound off.
Peace and quiet is necessary to be able to hear yourself think. I think the degree to which constant noise interferes with deep contemplation and self reflection goes largely unrecognized.
A lot of people could probably skip therapy entirely if they could just arrange to hear themselves think. But I think many people are intentionally avoiding that because the constant flak of noise obscuring their thoughts and feelings is critical to their ability to stay in a relationship that doesn't work or at a job they actually hate.
Hearing their own opinions about their own lives would likely compel many of them to make hard decisions and big changes and they would rather not know. That's scary. It's overwhelming. The noise that enables remaining stuck is like an anaesthetic.
[+] [-] colmvp|8 years ago|reply
I'm sure you aren't completely implying this but as someone who went through therapy and attended group classes where I encountered dozens of people with significantly worse forms of anxiety, there are a lot of people whose problem IS their thoughts.
Negative thoughts are capable of preventing people from doing even basic things like talking to a friendly stranger, washing dishes, or even getting out of bed to do a routine. It akin to having poor eye sight and being forced to wear a broken pair of glasses. Those thoughts completely change the perspective of the world, sap energy, and foster incredibly awful feelings. And I think without guidance, it's easy to get into a loop where thoughts can pull a person into a deeper darkness.
I personally find it much easier to be with my thoughts now that a lot of my life has changed for the better, but there's no way I think I could've done it without my therapist. I needed someone to be my champion, to be a voice that could counter my inner critic, to build my confidence before I had the capacity to challenge the beliefs that constantly prevented me from doing things that brought fulfillment.
[+] [-] manmal|8 years ago|reply
When I work, or talk to other people, I don’t hear any thoughts, and I think this is because the speech-building parts of the brain are preoccupied with the task at hand.
And if I talk to people, I often hear myself saying things I had not thought of before. I’m not in therapy, but I’m sure it would work way better for me than just thinking. Real talk definitely beats thoughts by a wide margin in clarity and expressiveness.
I definitely need silence for downtime though, I love staying up late alone for that reason.
[+] [-] bproven|8 years ago|reply
While washing the dishes one should only be washing the dishes, which means that while washing the dishes one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes. At first glance this might seem a little silly: why put so much stress on a simple thing? But that's precisely the point. The fact that I am standing there and washing these bowls is a wondrous reality. I'm being completely myself, following my breath, conscious of my presence, and conscious of my thoughts and actions. There's no way I can be tossed around mindlessly like a bottle slapped here and there on the waves.
[+] [-] skosch|8 years ago|reply
Thanks for this comment. I almost always listen to music while working, or to online noise generators. Your statement hits the nail on the head – it's an addiction to distract yourself into a pleasant dullness, and I've been blissfully ignoring it as such.
[+] [-] flatline|8 years ago|reply
I tend to agree, but it may take time to see therapeutic effects. That initial period of quieting, at least for me, through meditation, was more chaotic than the noise. It turned everything upside down, everything I thought I’d known about myself was pretty much wrong. I’d just been telling myself stories for years and when I stopped listening and believing they were the truth - wow. I don’t think you necessarily need to have anything external change in your life for it to be a big adjustment.
[+] [-] spike021|8 years ago|reply
It's great being able to get outside in the relative quiet. Maybe a walk at the beach, or in a forest, or on a hike in the hills. Maybe even a drive if you enjoy drives out of the city. Etc.
There isn't anything quite like it. But unfortunately many people seem to forget that we are able to do this.
[+] [-] gowld|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icantdrive55|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jimmies|8 years ago|reply
Sports events are the most prominent example. Going to popular sports matches in the US: football, ice hockey, basketball, etc. and you'll be bombarded with ads, noise, hype from the loudspeakers and flashing lights from the huge screens -- every single second you're there. When you watch the Super Bowl, you watch more ads than you watch the game. Going to a soccer game which is the most popular sport outside of the US, the only sound you'll ever hear is when the fans actually make noise. And perhaps, the announcement when they substitute players. By the way, it's quite cool to be in a high-stakes soccer match: There are volunteering leaders emerging from the crowd that orchestrate the people naturally. Noise in sports events are great, but only when they are not from the stupid flashing screens.
It's not a surprise to me that the laugh tracks were invented in America. Their presence in modern American sitcoms is annoying at best. But now, I think the producers started to realize that.
I think we are happier when we're treated like adults who know how to feel and behave.
[+] [-] bernardino|8 years ago|reply
"No, it's um... I mean, there's a difference, though, I think, between being mildly bored and but then there's another kind of boredom that I think you're talking about which is um: reading, reading requires sitting alone, by yourself, in a quiet room. And I have friends, intelligent friends, who don't like to read because they get - it's not just bored - there's an almost dread that comes up, I think, here about having to be alone and having to be quiet. And you see that when you walk in. When you walk into most public spaces in America it isn't quiet anymore; they pipe music through. And the music's easy to make fun of 'cause it's usually really horrible music. But it seems significant that we don't want things to be quiet, ever, anymore. And, to me, I don't, I don't know that I can defend it, but that seems to me to have something to do with when you feel like the purpose of your life is to gratify yourself and get things for yourself and go all the time, there's this other part of you that's the same part that can kind of, is almost hungry for silence and quiet and thinking really hard about the same thing for maybe half an hour instead of thirty seconds, that doesn't get fed at all. And it makes itself felt in the body in a kind of dread, in here. And I don't know whether that makes a whole lot of sense. But I think it's true that here in the US, every year the culture gets more and more hostile - and I don't mean hostile like angry - just, it becomes more and more difficult to ask people to read, or to look at a piece of art for an hour, or to listen, to listen to a piece of music that's complicated and that takes work to understand, because - well, there are a lot of reasons - but, particularly now in the computer and internet culture everything's so fast, and the faster things go the more we feed that part of ourselves but don't feed the part of ourselves that likes, that likes quiet, that can live in quiet, you know, that can live without any kind of stimulation. I don't know."
[+] [-] throwawaymsft|8 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vJn5XxWg9U
[+] [-] stevenwoo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taeric|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cyphar|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sneak|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brandonmenc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vitro|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] procedural_love|8 years ago|reply
"Science says quiet is good for you."
"Finland is a place that is quiet."
"You should go to Finland."
It's not even subtle but I didn't see it mentioned in these comments at all.
[+] [-] mncharity|8 years ago|reply
HYPER-REALITY[0] is a fun exploration of ad pollution in AR. Of course one can use similar tech to support quiet.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs (2016)
[+] [-] nabla9|8 years ago|reply
I have started to look down whenever there are these ads around.
[+] [-] remir|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandov|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fefb|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ivm|8 years ago|reply
Can't find your contact details – maybe ping me on Twitter (ivmirx) or via email (ivan at qotoqot.com)?
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] fiatjaf|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] montrose|8 years ago|reply
This was in mice, but if silence turns out to grow neurons in humans too, that will be big news.
[+] [-] Mononokay|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intrasight|8 years ago|reply
http://nautil.us/issue/38/noise/noise-is-a-drug-and-new-york...
Lewis Black, a comedian, couches his praise of noise in a cynical one-liner, noting dryly, “The reason I live in New York City is because it’s the loudest city on the planet Earth. It’s so loud I never have to listen to any of the shit that’s going on in my own head.”
[+] [-] baxtr|8 years ago|reply
Just a word of caution: Experiments that work in mice don’t necessarily work in humans [1]. These findings are very preliminary, although interesting.
[1] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2016/11/01/the-troubl...
[+] [-] curlcntr|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mirimir|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrei_says_|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperpallium|8 years ago|reply
This consolidation consists in making information fit together "better", by seeking patterns and other redundancies - resulting in both compression and insight. A role also assigned to sleep.
It's more basic than intellectual consolidation, but things like the concept of a chair. (Not the philosphical concept of a chair, but some particular person's actual concept).
But it also explains why we have spontaneous insight when disengaged, e.g. in the shower.
[+] [-] tpallarino|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m_fayer|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewbinstock|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] juhq|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vinceguidry|8 years ago|reply
Stimulation becomes a "resource," one that you want to get rid of as fast as you gather it. But the easiest way to get rid of it is to not gather it in the first place.
As you get deeper into trance, other things you're not so skilled at ignoring start to make themselves known. You need to learn how to ignore those too. Otherwise you just don't have a whole lot of fun.
The brain can ignore practically anything. Many psychological disorders involve the brain not being able to ignore things that most people can ignore, such as OCD or tinnitus. If I'm in a weird state, tinnitus can become really awful. But most of the time it's not a thing. I submit that 90% of tinnitus cases could be solved with some guided meditation, and 9% of the other 10% needs the attention of a TMJ specialist. Maybe 10% of 10%.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] remir|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doseofreality|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] craftyguy|8 years ago|reply
(Ad tossed up immediately upon opening the article)
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] throwaway76025|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattbgates|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tlrobinson|8 years ago|reply
I actually want to go to Finland and make a lot of noise right now. Maybe I've been browsing https://reddit.com/r/firstworldanarchists too much lately.