Volume 8 Issue 1 2015

W e all know the challenge of supporting nurseries to become calm and quiet places where an infant may hear the soft comforting murmur of the parents' voice speaking or singing.The deleterious effects of high levels of "noise" in nurseries, toxic to all, infants, families and staff alike, are undisputed.It is all the more important, therefore, to meet the challenge we face in the nursery by first becoming steady and trustworthy sources of calm and quiet ourselves.Finding and maintaining the silence within so that we may assist others is a continuing process and often a real struggle.Our environment is polluted with sound, taxing and toxic to our well-being.What is it about humans that making noise is such a pervasive phenomenon?Our car doors beep when we open them and again when we close them; beeps remind us to take action with our seatbelts, washing machines and coffee maker alarms.Pedestrians walk about with ear buds that pipe music or podcasts, often loud enough for others to hear, directly into their ears and brains.Waiting rooms are pervasively equipped with television sets often set at high volume levels and non-adjustable.Airports, already oppressive with loudly rattling and clanking luggage carousels, provide travelers with continuous announcements and television newscasts set to increase in volume automatically when a plane arrives and passengers come through the gate into the waiting halls.We attempt to be heard in conversation by speaking at high volumes against this background din.Neighborhoods and whole towns complain about the noise pollution from commuter trains, truck and bus routes; some even must endure life beneath the flight paths of local airports.Communities insist on highway walls to gain at least a psychological protection.Every so often when it becomes all too much, we attempt to regain our balance, "flee into nature," leaving our electronic devices behind to refresh ourselves, or so we hope, in the quiet and silence of a forest, the mountains, a lake or the ocean.Nature's sounds differ remarkably in their effects on us from the sounds we generate through our technological advances.We fail to recognize this disconnect and as a result our industries spend too little effort on designing and producing psychologically friendly, that is, quiet equipment.Too little aware of our deeply rooted biological vulnerability, we attempt to overcome our sub-cortical responses by cortical override.While our brains have developed impressive habituation mechanisms, this habituation comes at a high cost and this cost often takes us unawares.