Orfield Laboratories Anechoic Chamber is officially the quietest place on earth--which at first, given the amount of sleep I havent been getting since we took babyboy halfway around the word, sounded like a dream. Only then I remembered that actually, having grown up in a house of nine people, two dogs, and various and countless cats, I find silence a little unnerving. Apparently, total and complete silence (or 99.99% sound absorption, to be specific) is more than a little unnerving: stay in too long, and you start to go mad. Its so quiet that, once your ears have adjusted, you can hear your internal organs working, and become so spacially disoriented that you have to sit in a char. Of course the room wasnt built purely for novelty; its used to perform sound testing, and to condition astronauts for the silence of outerspace. Company owner Stephen Orfield recently challenged reporters to stay in the chamber alone in the dark as long as they could; the longest anyone lasted was 45 minutes.
I sort of think Id like to try it out--but not in the dark!! Can you even imagine?!
via the Daily Mail
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