A series of experiments conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins University in the United States showed that people can hear silence. The results of the research were presented in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
It turns out that brain silence processes sounds the same way it processes sounds. According to the authors, this is why people feel uncomfortable during a pause in a conversation or a quiet pause between thunder.
During the study, seven experiments were conducted in which one thousand volunteers participated. All subjects were allowed to listen to single and repeated pauses of a train, a crowded restaurant, grocery store, playground, or against the background of white noise as well as beeps. They thought the silence was longer and showed the same reaction as when listening to audio signals.
“Illusions and effects that are thought to be typical of sound processing also occur in silence, suggesting that we actually hear the absence of sound,” the authors write.
ancient scientists to create the missing link in the evolution of binary systems of massive stars.