The Downside of Silence

Source: copyright Fumiste Studios / Used with permission

I first became interested in silence over 15 years ago when an overdose of New York City noise got me wondering if and how I could find refuge in its opposite, in absolute quiet—something that was not merely a reduction in or lack of noise, but a vibrant counterpoint to the sounds which we assume define and shape our lives. I wrote a book about silence, and what I found in the process was a dictionary of dangers—from stress-related cardiac problems to a pervasive anxiety—arising from excessive noise in our sound-saturated society.

In contrast, locating and living in a relative quiet seemed to offer only upside: benefits such as better cardiac health as well as personal calm, a reduction in angst; a deeper understanding of the fact that silence and other voids, like the space between notes, are just as important in shaping our words and images as are noisy assertions of busy-ness and action.

In the years since the book came out, it seems more and more people have come to appreciate the benefits of silence and of those who purvey it: For example, when I was researching the book, I found only two sensory-deprivation tanks (in which total silence reigns) in the New York area; 15 years later, an online search reveals dozens. Whole industries now focus on noise reduction: businesses that sell acoustic insulation earned over $16 billion last year, and in 2025 the active-noise-canceling headphone industry was worth almost $21 billion.

What's the downside of silence?

But is there a downside to silence? I came to this question sideways, through the interest of a staunchly conservative British newspaper that wanted to interview me on the subject; through another publication also, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which devoted an article to the eerie silence featured at the end of four feature films about nuclear holocaust.

I should be clear: In societies dominated by the endless, unchallenged growth of industrial and service industries, the noise these inevitably generate tends to cause harm. By way of example, one in three Americans is exposed to noise sufficient to cause health risks. By the same token, seeking silence logically helps to reduce those risks. But in researching the negative effects of silence, I came across two candidates, one psychological, one socio-political.

A study of the psychological downside of silence focuses on the role of the ventral vagus nerve in regulating the autonomic nervous system, the fight-or-flight response in particular. "Inner silence"—defined as a state of quiet within the mind: a lack of chatter or distractions—seems to tickle the ventral vagus into quieting the autonomous nervous system, favoring social engagement and reducing nervous system activity and physiological stimulation. "Outer silence" on the other hand—broadly speaking, a lack of surrounding environmental noise—"can induce a heightened state of alertness, potentially triggering vagal brake removal and sympathetic nervous system activation." It's a scientific version of that iconic scene in a Western movie in which a frontiersman on night watch comments, "It's quiet, Jake," and his companion responds, "Yep—too quiet."

This last finding is a surprise to me since my personal experience and that of almost everyone I know is almost exclusively the opposite. (And I wonder, in this context, whether the panic notoriously induced in people experiencing for the first time a sound-proof, anechoic chamber—such as the one in Orfield Labs, in Minneapolis [1]—is not a raw function of this inhibition of the central vagus.) The study goes on to note, however, that outer silence can also have a positive effect: "With training, outer silence can foster inner silence, preventing activation of the sympathetic nervous system." 'Training' includes meditation, famliarity with quiet, empathy and other favorable contexts.

Trauma and silence

A less subliminal example of how silence can be harmful is in people affected by various forms of trauma, PTSD, and social anxiety disorder. The starkest example, known as selective mutism, appears to manifest in persons (usually young) who find themselves utterly unable to speak in certain situations or to certain people as a result of pre-existing trauma: mutism, for group-oriented animals such as humans, being the most extreme form of social silence. According to one study, avoidance behavior as well as motor inhibition or freezing seem to be associated with this inability to speak. Other studies note that the syndrome often correlates with autism spectrum disorder, OCD, and Asperger's Syndrome.

In all these cases, one can argue that silence appears negative only by association with a disorder adversely affecting a patient's psychological health, whereas it may in fact work as a mechanism that enables patients to cope with stressful situations which might, in turn, result in worse outcomes should they be forced to express themselves in speech.

The other negative type of silence is socio-political. It's the silence that happens when members of a given society, largely from fear of punishment, don't speak out against events or policies that are objectively unjust, discriminatory or cruel. Typically this kind of silence happens under repressive governments or other coercive structures of authority. The examples—one need only think back to Germany under Hitler, the Soviet Union under Stalin—are too numerous to enumerate but the issue has not lost relevance now, when transnational digital surveillance and attendant punishment of dissent, according to a Columbia University study, have become increasingly pervasive globally.

One new perspective on whether an individual will speak out or not against injustice or political repression comes from a recent Arizona State University study that analyzes three different responses to poilitical repression: compliance, self-censorship, and defiance. The study finds societies that are initially tolerant of free speech tend to speak out against authoritarianism more strongly and earlier than those in which open expression is traditionally less common. It's a finding that makes intuitive sense and underlines the importance, to any so-called "free" society, of decisive action against even the first tiny erosions of civil liberties.

Which brings us, finally, to that Bulletin of Atomic Scientists article, which starts off with a review of Kathryn Bigelow's current movie, House of Dynamite, and then brings up other films which describe a nuclear holocaust only to end on a blank, silent screen: because, the article contends, neither images, sounds, nor words can encompass or express such apocalypse. "The film's final silence is not a full stop but an ellipse ... a space of suspended meaning where the audience must imagine the unimaginable."

Imagining the unimaginable—as described in my previous post—is something humans are not very good at due to our brains' structural preference for using past experience to handle future catastrophe, even if that catastrophe is orders of magnitude more serious than anything we've ever seen. It's something that history suggests is a good idea to bear in mind, and rein in if we can.