Until now, I believed that the most difficult torture for a person is the lack of sleep: an ordinary person who is not allowed to sleep for several days will ask for death faster than he will endure and … not give out a secret, for example. Several days …
It turns out that there is an even more terrible test that a person can withstand a maximum of 45 minutes (wow - a lesson!). I have not experienced it myself, and there is no such place nearby. But, wait, you have invented a room in which almost absolute silence (99.99%) is achieved and this is how it looks:
According to the Guinness Book of Records, this is a special room; headquartered in South Minneapolis (USA) at Orfield Laboratories. To achieve exceptional silence, the room used one meter thick fiberglass acoustic platforms, insulated steel double walls and 30cm thick concrete.
Company founder and president Stephen Orfield said that when it gets so quiet, your hearing begins to adapt.
“The quieter the room, the more things you hear. You start to hear your heart pounding, sometimes your lungs moving or your stomach gurgling. In an anechoic chamber, you become sound yourself,”he explained.
He further explains that this terribly confuses the experimenter and makes him sit in one place. When we walk, we are guided not only by sight, but also by the sounds we hear; there are no signals in a chamber without echoes that would allow balancing and maneuvering. If you find yourself here for half an hour, it is best to stay in your chair.
Promotional video:
The room is for practical use: it is used by many manufacturers to test the volume of their products, such as heart valves, the sound of a mobile phone display, the sound of a switch on a car dashboard. It is also used to determine the quality of sound.
But for a person, as I said, such a room can be a severe test. After a few minutes of being in it, you begin to pick up more and more faint sounds. This shutdown of the senses begins to drain. For example, NASA astronauts, who have sufficient training in a tank filled with water, in such a room after a while begin to experience hallucinations.
With the lights off, the longest time a person could survive in this room was 45 minutes. The founder himself could only endure 30 minutes. According to him, the most distracting person is not noise, but silence.