Sight and Sound are twin brothers and our brains love getting both in sync and originating from the very same direction in space. These are little details in a day that make the brain feel a tad happier and well adjusted and well… cool.
If this is really so much of a thing for it, then why not oblige your brain and offer it just such a treat?
Same for sound quality. Your brain, or at least your reptilian brain, or R Complex (at the very core of the thing quietly nestled between your ears), really, really, really, feels good when the soundscape within a reasonable distance around is quiet. This deeply imprinted behaviour dates back to our hunter gatherer days, when we lived in caves and forests.
Quiet does not mean dead silent though. Quiet means…. bird songs, wind in the trees and a river flowing nearby. These sort of soft and happy sounds tell your ‘greenie’ inside that all is for the best, and everybody can relax and gather for a bit.
On the other hand…. Silence, no birds, then brief crackling noises getting louder; it’s time to run for your life. That is part of your reptilian brain’s job – to prepare and warn your body about such events, by flooding it with stress hormones, and your body reacts, for sure. Without so much opportunity for your all modern, all fancy, all thinking neocortex to retain lead tough. In such a case you are pretty much in auto mode, hence the name of the thing in control, ‘reptilian brain’.
Reptilian brain is part of the Triune Brain model hypothesised by Paul MacLean in the 1960 and popularised by Carl Sagan in the 70’s. In this model, the triune brain consists of the reptilian complex, the limbic system, and the neocortex, viewed as structures sequentially added to the forebrain in the course of evolution. Reptilian brain caters for most of the unconscious/automated/instinctive needs of our body, including heart beating, breathing and hormone flooding, for example in case of emergency.
While limbic system would be hosting most of the tribal behaviours as well as the so called conscious thinking, the intellect, the mind. Finally the neocortex and especially the prefrontal cortex is where all the highly evolved things like feelings, sensations and intuition take place.
As if, as I choose to put it for now, our heads were hosting an instinctive animal (reptilian) a human mind (limbic) and an intuitive god (neocortex). One last thing, reptilian brain is fast, limbic system is slow and neocortex is ultra fast too. So, at about 40bits per seconds, all your intellect, your mind, can actually do to feel good beyond acknowledging it has not much to do in fast decision processes is to rationalise/validate/ revisit decisions already taken a long time ago by either or both the reptilian and/or the neocortex (at about 40’000’000 bits per second or one million time faster).
Or, as David Engeleman expresses it so nicely on BBC Future, “Our conscious minds are really just a summary of what our brains get up to all the time”
I am not too sure this multi-brain model, R Complex/Limbic/Neocortex, can be described with such simplified views today, but nevertheless you get the idea: among other events, sound control you pretty much unconsciously and there is not much you can do about it.
By the way, Daniel Kahneman, who incidentally got a Noble price for his work, doesn’t really bother locating the strangely named bits of the brain responsible for this or that behaviour. Well at least he did not when he started his research in the 1970’s. Instead he came up with a model altogether nicer cleaner and simpler; “Thinking fast and slow”. In a nutshell, System 1 and System 2 are both you thinking, one really fast System 1 and the second rather slow System 2. System One in responsible for all the fast stuff going on, like instinct, intuition and safety issue. System Two is responsible for believing he is at the origin of these feelings and deciding if he is happy about it or not. Things System Two does that much later, so there is not much it can do about it by then, besides rationalising. However, we are fitted with both so a good cooperation between the two, one gathering and feeding data, albeit slowly and the other making faster than light life changing decisions, thus my feeling is that if we care and manage both respectfully we will do well.
You will feel like enjoying the moment when sound quality around you is defined as “good” by you own inner autopilot or, when exposed to bad noise, feel tense, on alert, with all the blood in the limbs, inner organs on ‘eco-mode’, ready to fight, or ready to run.
And that my friend is exactly how Glaxo-Smithkline would describe stress.
Stress, Cortisol and the Adrenaline bits were good things when your ancestors were still hunter gatherers. So much of a good thing in fact, that they have achieved in becoming your ancestors indeed, instead of merely declining while acting too much as main courses for some sort of big, furry creatures with lots of teeth.
But today, huh, not much use for stress though. Particularly not when experiencing it full time. Bad news is that people from the 3 brain model era are pretty sure there is nothing you can do about these primal reactions from the inside. More recent studies might actually state otherwise, but nevertheless, in both cases there is something that can be done outside about the quality of sound that now surrounds us. About our soundscapes.
That can be done in the street, in homes, in workplace, in aeroplanes, airports, cars, concert halls and festivals. There is in fact, something that can be done about sound quality in just about any place where we earthlings have settled. The moon probably being the most notable exception, as, as we know sound travels in the air and with so little of it up there, it actually must be pretty quiet indeed… but relaxing.
OK, but when we talk about ‘sound quality’, what do we mean then? Well, for a start there are the levels: Loud / Soft. Then there’s the pitch: getting higher in pitch: coming towards you, getting lower in pitch: going away (think of a police car’s sirens). Then there’s distance; the higher the frequencies, the closer the sound is, the lesser the highs, the further it is. (Think of the sound of thunder). Finally, there’s direction. When your brain senses something that makes noise, it really enjoys having the sound AND the sight coming from precisely the same direction. If sight and sound don’t correlate, then more bad news…. there may be more than one furry creature. The brain uses your two ears and your nose to locate a sound in the horizontal plan. Your brain is incredibly good at using all of the sound cues described above in order to decide if life is cool, or if another shot of cortisol is in order to prepare your body for a good run. Mostly needing none of your thought process to make these life saving decisions in a jiffy, and actually doing it much, much faster than it would take for any well evolved individual to form a well matured concept in his well evolved ‘2nd brain’. Try to suppress this with your will! As seen above, System One hears and locate a sound for you and this is not under your System 2 control, at all. By the time your heard a sound you know exactly where it comes from that’s it, but then System Two kicks in and… can decide if you want to look in the direction or not.
So…..Improvements in sound quality can actually relate to all of the above and more and, while further details are coming in future chapters, let us summarise briefly, the potential tasks at hand:
– better correlation between eyes and ears at big shows with sound reinforcement systems
– softer, quieter systems for shows and concerts, with less distortion, better directionality and better coverage
– softer, quieter rooms in clinics, hospitals and offices
– softer, quieter workspaces, particularly for open spaces
– softer, quieter classrooms with much better room acoustics
– softer, quieter, clearer and better designed public address systems in public spaces, airport and sport arenas
– softer, quieter, clearer, better designed sound systems in retail stores and shopping centres
– better choices of content, music, with less or no, advertising
– better mp3s, better headphones
– better sound systems pretty much anywhere, you get the idea!
If you think this is all new and surprising, it isn’t really, it’s just not widespread enough. But I can think of at least one category of humans that have understood that for centuries: The ‘Wealthy’.
Try for once, to enter a palace. It really serves to demonstrate that when doing important things like getting richer, humans much prefer doing it in a nice, soft sounding place, whenever possible.
Meanwhile, heaps of top notch corporate A players are piled into terrible sounding open spaces for most of their days and are asked to “perform”. And that after having spent an hour or so in traffic jams listening to poor radio with lots of loud advertising, or even worse, in public transportation, with all the usual allowance of noises associated with crowd, crowd management and technology. All you end up with are stressed out Neanderthals, full of cortisol and adrenaline, with very little efficiency and kindness at hand. Alternatively, the world would be a much better, nicer and richer place if populated by relaxed dudes.
Offer better looking better sounding workplace, efficiency will skyrocket. (But… expect nose dives in keyboard/mouse/screen damage)
Same reasoning applies to most of the other places humans like or are required to spend time into. Palaces probably being the exception, improvement in sound quality can benefit greatly to happiness, well-being, expectedly but to business and productivity too.
Some of these sound improvements can come from addressing acoustical issues, like damping reflections, or addressing electro-acoustical issues, like using properly designed sound systems with adequate performances. We will detail the possibilities of these in coming chapters.
This post is also available in: Anglais
