Silence can be 'heard', can distort one's perception of time, research says

Silence can not only be heard, it can also distort people's perception of time, a team of philosophers and psychologists have found using auditory illusions in 1,000 people.

An auditory illusion, similar to an optical illusion which tricks what people see, is where a listener 'hears' sounds that should not be possible given the circumstance on how they were created.

''We typically think of our sense of hearing as being concerned with sounds. But silence, whatever it is, is not a sound - it's the absence of sound,'' said lead author Rui Zhe Goh, a graduate student in philosophy and psychology, Johns Hopkins University, US.

''Surprisingly, what our work suggests is that nothing is also something you can hear,'' said Zhe Goh.

For this study, the scientists adapted familiar auditory illusions such as the 'one-is-more', in which participants have been known to find one long beep longer than two short consecutive beeps even when the two sequences were equally long.

They inverted these illusions such that brief periods of silence abruptly punctuated soundscapes depicting the din coming from crowded places like busy restaurants, markets and train stations.

''Our approach was to ask whether our brains treat silences the way they treat sounds. If you can get the same illusions with silences as you get with sounds, then that may be evidence that we literally hear silence after all,'' said Chaz Firestone, an assistant professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, who directs the Johns Hopkins Perception & Mind Laboratory.

The researchers found the same results - people thought one long moment of silence was longer than two short moments of silence.

Other silence illusions too yielded the same outcomes as sound illusions, they said in the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The idea wasn't simply that these silences made people experience illusions, but that the same illusions that scientists thought could only be triggered with sounds worked just as well when the sounds were replaced by silences, the researchers said.

''The kinds of illusions and effects that look like they are unique to the auditory processing of a sound, we also get them with silences, suggesting we really do hear absences of sound too,'' said co-author Ian Phillips, professor of Philosophy and Psychological and Brain Sciences.

The findings establish a new way to study the perception of absence, the team which intends to investigate visual disappearances and other examples of things people can perceive as being absent said.

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