Hundraj Gopal, a speech and hearing scientist. Reflecting on the anxiety people often feel in the chamber’ s otherworldly quiet, he said,“ Most people find the absence of sound deafening.”
Note:“ deafening.”
That’ s because most people go into the chamber expecting to hear silence. But when they arrive, what they hear instead is the sound of themselves— and not just their blood pumping and internal organs organing. They often feel overcome by the sheer anxiety of their own minds. Some exit the chamber within minutes, breathing heavily and in duress. In sessions of thirty minutes or longer, people often hallucinate or begin to go mad.
It turns out“ ourselves” can be a terrifying sound.
Especially for those of us who grew up in a society with an incredibly low threshold for pain.
Western culture, especially for the upwardly mobile, is increasingly designed around therapeutic wellness. After working brutally long hours at highly stressful jobs, many of us spend our free time in a strange mix of hurried overactivity and various attempts to offset our pent-up stress with the latest
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