Over the summer, I tried to find a patch of quiet. I spent some time
wearing a portable EEG device on my head in different settings,
trying to get a sense of which kind of places put me in the holy grail
of brain states, the “calm alert” zone prized by Zen masters, surfers
and poets. I was after alpha waves. When electricity in the alpha
wavelength dominates parts of the brain, it’s a sign that you are not
hassled by small distractions, problem-solving or, my peeve, meal
planning. Parenting—any kind of caretaking—is a procession of
small, endless decisions. Too often, I assume the executive function
for the whole family, and I can almost hear my mind stomping out
any rogue alpha waves. It’s the sound of brain fry.
Daily aggravations aside, environmental noise deters alphas
because we have to either pay attention to the intrusion or actively
resist paying attention to it, and that’s work too. I couldn’t quite hit
the alpha zone walking in the city parks near my house, and I couldn’t
even attain it on a leafy, rural road in Maine either, probably thanks to
nearby construction noise, which ended up pissing me off. When my
brain waves were later read by the interpreting software, it fired back
this message: “This indicates that in this state you were actively
processing information and, perhaps, that you should relax more
often!”
Even the software was yelling at me. I wanted to yell back, but
this would be a mistake. There are no alpha waves when you’re mad.
And the maddening truth is, the world is getting louder.
Can you hear it? “Noise” is unwanted sound, and levels from
human activities have been doubling about every thirty years, faster
than population growth. Traffic on roads in the United States tripled
between 1970 and 2007. According to the U.S. National Park Service,
83 percent of the land in the lower forty-eight states sits within 3,500
feet of a road, close enough to hear vehicles. For planes, the figures
are even more dramatic: The number of passenger flights has
increased 25 percent since just 2002, and 30,000 commercial aircraft
fly overhead per day. In 2012, the Federal Aviation Administration
predicted an astounding 90 percent increase in air traffic over the next
twenty years. Human activities in general increase background noise
levels by about 30 decibels. The official word for the human-made
soundscape is the anthrophone.
Stats like those above dismayed Gordon Hempton, a sound
engineer based in Washington State who decided to travel the country
in search of the few remaining quiet places. By his count, the entire
continental United States has fewer than a dozen sites where you can’t
hear human-made noise for at least fifteen minutes at dawn. That’s a
pretty ridiculously low bar. But it is still so out of reach. The quietest
place in the country, Hempton discovered, is a spot in the Hoh
Rainforest at Olympic National Park. If you want to hear the earth
without us, it’s marked by a red stone on a moss-covered log at 47-
degrees 51.959N, 123-degrees 52.221W, 678 feet above sea level. But
get there early; by midday, even there, you can hear overflights a
dozen times per hour. Noise may well be the most pervasive pollutant
in America.
I never thought much about airplane noise until I moved to D.C. I
grew up on the eleventh floor of an apartment building in New York,
where the sounds of the city were mostly muted and charismatic: a
flash of mariachi, a distant ambulance, a summer storm. Out West,
the planes were fewer and farther away. But my neighborhood now is
one of the loudest in the city thanks to flights following the Potomac
River as they roar in and out of Reagan National Airport. Jets fly
overhead at a rate of about one every two minutes starting early in the
morning, with average decibel levels between 55 and 60 but
sometimes spiking much higher (60 decibels is high enough to drown
out normal speech; over 80 can damage hearing).
I knew this moving in. Neighbors assured me I would learn to
ignore the planes. “After a year or so, you don’t hear them anymore,
”
they’d said. But it’s been over two years now and I still hear the
planes. They drive me crazy. It’s hard to eat alfresco, impossible to
talk on the phone with the backdoor open. Between the planes and the
routine security surveillance choppers, I feel like I’m in a militarized
zone when I walk near the river. My gaze is drawn up, and I can read
the logo on the fuselages. Sometimes, I can even make out the theme
animal on the Frontier Airlines tail fins. There’s the mustang! It’s
wildlife-viewing, D.C.-style.
Then there are the nettlesome sounds of competitive landscaping:
the parading whines and drones of weed-whackers, lawn-mowers,
leaf-blowers and, if I’m exceedingly unlucky and under deadline,
circular saws. Such are the afflictions of close quarters, and they
aren’t necessarily new. The Victorian historian Thomas Carlyle didn’t
hear engines while working on his biography of Frederick the Great
from his study in London, but he was made apoplectic by chickens,
carriages and dogs. So maddened was he that he commissioned at
great expense the making of a soundproof room in his attic. It nearly
killed him. It was so airtight that when he lit up for a smoke, he
passed out, only to be saved by the maid.
As Charles Montgomery writes in his book Happy City,
“Living
under the flight path of commuter jets is terrible for happiness . . . but
we do not always respond logically to environmental stimulus.”
Right. The logical thing would be to go the hell back to Colorado. My
neighbors aren’t exactly wrong. People can become habituated to
sound, at least partly. We’ve all heard stories of people who say they
can’t sleep if it’s too quiet, or they can’t work apart from a din. Some
writers have apps that replicate the sounds of a coffee shop for when
they are working at home. I know a New Yorker who now lives in the
country, but he plays himself devotionally made recordings of 14th
Street, sirens and all, to fall asleep at night.
I keep hoping this settling into noise will happen to me, that I will
become inured or even nurtured somehow by the city sounds, but it
isn’t happening. In fact, I’ve learned that full habituation is a bit of a
pipe dream. Just because you don’t notice certain noises anymore
doesn’t mean your brain is not on some level responding to them.
Scientists and regulators used to be interested in noise pollution
because of the threat of hearing loss, which is real and happening to
many of us at younger and younger ages. But even at dramatically
lower volumes, noise poses risks far beyond our ear canals. In
fascinating studies, people have been hooked up to electrocardiogram
monitors while sleeping through plane, train and traffic noise.
Whether or not they woke up, their sympathetic nervous systems
reacted dramatically to the sounds, elevating their heart rates, blood
pressure and respiration. In one study that lasted three weeks, the
subjects showed no biological signs of habituating to the noise, and in
another study that lasted for years, the biological effects only got
wors