World's quietest room less than zero decibels

Ryan Trahan (YT); BBC Future; Microsoft; Kelly Ani, Pat Macpherson (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

I survived the world's quietest room (-9 decibels)

(Ryan Trahan) 21,843,300 views. Oct. 18, 2021. What is the world's quietest room? It used to be this one, but they recently made a quieter one. It's time to defeat Dr. Phil to get him to adopt me. Lots of crazy things go through a person's head in a peaceful environment.

• The quietest place in the world (WIRED)
• Earth’s quietest place will drive one crazy in 45 minutes (Smithsonian Magazine)

Inside the quietest place on earth

Richard Gray (BBC Future, May 28, 2017) edited by Wisdom Quarterly

Testing headphones inside the chamber (wiki)

Microsoft has built a chamber so quiet that one can hear the grind of one's own bones – and it’s helping to fine-tune the next-generation of electronic goods.

If LeSalle Munroe stands still for a few moments in his “office,” something unsettling can happen: He can hear the blood rushing around his body and his eyes squelch as they move in his skull.

While many people work in places filled with the tip-tap of keyboards, the hubbub of chatter from colleagues, and a constant hum of computers, Munroe is surrounded by almost total silence.

His office is the quietest place on the planet. [There might be quieter places in the planet, deep in caves and caverns, or those isolation chambers in Altered States.]

Isolation chambers alter states

The specially constructed chamber is hidden in the depths of Building 87 at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, where the firm’s hardware laboratories are based.

Products like the Surface computers, Xbox, and Hololens have all been developed here. Microsoft’s engineers built the room – known as an anechoic chamber – to help them test new equipment.

That includes sound muffling equipment that in 2015 set the official world record for silence when the background noise level inside was measured at an ear-straining -20.6 decibels. [Google has gotten it even lower. By comparison, a library is about 40 decibels, more than 60 decibels louder.] More

If only they were meditators, they could last longer

Yes, yes, more silence!

Imagine a Zen monk, a forest dwelling Theravada Buddhist wandering ascetic (an original shaman or shramana), lost in his or her object of meditation, fully absorbed (jhana-fied) in the bliss of stillness. With that as one's goal or abode, hours in an anechoic chamber could be bliss. That would be the place to get tested, the way UCLA has MARC or its Mindful Awareness Research Center to test people in Buddhist meditative states.