These days, silence can be hard to come by. Unless you are fortunate enough to live in the countryside or a more rural area, you can pretty much guarantee that there will always be some sort of background noise. We all seek it from time to time, but would you really be able to stand total silence? The ?anechoic chamber? at Orfield Laboratories in South Minneapolis is so quite it has been known to cause hallucinations.
Its walls are 99.9% sound absorbent, and the silence so deadening that the longest anyone has been able to spend inside the room is 45 minutes. The room currently holds the Guinness World Record for quietest place on earth with a background noise reading of -9.4 decibels. It achieves its silence thought the use of 3.3-foot-thick fiberglass acoustic wedges and double insulated walls of concrete and steel.
In this chamber, you become the sound. You begin to hear your heart beating, stomach churning and sometimes you can even hear your lungs. It is no wonder that people have a hard time staying in the room for long, and the companies founder openly challenges anyone to sit in the room in total darkness for as long as they can. So how do you think you would do if you were sat alone in this room? would you beat 45 minutes?.
via Daily Mail