Nearly 60 years after American folk duo Simon & Garfunkel sang their dangerously earworm-y tune “The Sound of Silence,” a team of researchers has resurrected the age-old question as to whether the absence of noise in itself is something we can actually hear.
“We typically think of our sense of hearing as being concerned with sounds,” said lead author Rui Zhe Goh, a Johns Hopkins University graduate student in philosophy and psychology. “But silence, whatever it is, is not a sound – it’s the absence of sound. “Surprisingly, what our work suggests is that nothing is also something you can hear.”
Zhe Goh, along with cognitive scientist Chaz Firestone and philosopher Ian Phillips, set out to answer one question: Do our minds treat silence and sounds the same way?
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