Drop Dead Healthy by A. Jacobs (books to read to increase intelligence .TXT) 📕

hearing loss. And with our omnipresent earbuds, that number is bound to rise.

Even without earbuds, we naturally lose hearing as we age, as the sensory hair cells inside the cochlea erode. Babies can hear sounds that are twenty thousand cycles per second, while the average adult can hear at sixteen thousand cycles per second. Our ability to hear higher registers goes first, which means that the voices of women and children are silenced sooner, as if God were W. C. Fields.

Hearing loss is bad enough, but it’s not even the most pressing problem. Noise has a surprisingly potent effect on our stress level, cardiovascular system, and concentration. Just go back to our Paleo ancestor for a minute. In caveman times, a loud noise signaled a threat—an angry mastodon, perhaps. So noise activates the infamous fight-or-flight response: high adrenaline and high blood pressure. Nowadays, we’re bombarded by loud noises almost all day long, meaning our fight-or-flight instinct gets little downtime. One review found that people who work noisy jobs suffered two to three times the heart problems as those who work in quiet settings. In his book In Pursuit of Silence, George Prochnik cites a former World Health Organization official who estimates—with perhaps a bit of alarmism—that “45,000 fatal heart attacks per year may be attributable to noise-related cardiovascular strain.”

Something starts whirring in Bronzaft’s kitchen.

“What’s that sound?” I ask.

“The refrigerator,” she says. “When I found out it made that noise, I was shocked.”

Noise harms the ears and the heart—but it also wreaks havoc on the brain.

Our wise founding fathers knew this back in the 1700s. “When they wrote the Constitution in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, they realized noise was going to disrupt them because the horses and wagons would clatter over the cobblestones,” Bronzaft says. “So they packed dirt on the cobblestones to lessen the noise of passing traffic.”

That’s right. Noise is unpatriotic. (And quite possibly fascist. I read a quote from Hitler that he “couldn’t have won Germany without a bullhorn.”)

Bronzaft was one of the first to show scientifically that noise messes with the mind. In 1970, she was working as a transportation adviser to the mayor of New York, helping to design the subway map. She wasn’t even focused on noise pollution. (And oddly, she says that she isn’t overly sensitive to noise; she became interested in it as a public health problem.)

She conducted a landmark study at a public school in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood. Some of the classrooms faced directly out on an elevated subway track. Every five minutes the students heard a train rattle by. Other classrooms were tucked on the opposite side of the building, away from the noise. The difference? By the sixth grade, the kids in the quiet classrooms were about one year ahead in reading.

Her conclusions have since been backed up by a pile of other studies, both on students and adults. As George Prochnik writes, even “moderate noise from white-noise machines, air conditioners and background television, for example, can still undermine children’s language acquisition.”

When Bronzaft started, the antinoise movement was seen somewhere between organic foods and mandatory clothes for Greek sculpture on the kookiness scale. Nowadays, it’s edging ever closer to the mainstream. There are more noise-reducing ceilings, altered flight patterns, and warning labels on products. There are activists all over the country tilting at wind turbines, motocross raceways, and leaf blowers. “This is not just a big-city problem,” says Bronzaft.

It’s been almost two hours. Bronzaft may be antinoise, but she’s not the quiet type. She’s a talker.

She tells me the plot of her unpublished novel about an old lady killed by her loud neighbors. It’s called For Dying Out Loud.

“Did my novel have sex in it? Yes, it did. A lot. My daughter couldn’t read it. Did it depict noise? Yes. It had murder, it had mystery, but it didn’t have a novelist’s touch. I’m too academic.”

I interrupt Bronzaft to tell her that I have to pick up my kids from school. I say good-bye, catch the bus, and ride home trying to ignore the rumbles and squeaks of traffic.

Listening Carefully

That evening, I pledge to turn down the volume on my life. I start in my kids’ room. I dig out all their beeping, screeching, yammering electronic toys, and spend half an hour putting masking tape over the plastic speakers.

“What are you doing, Daddy?” asks Lucas.

“Just fixing the broken toys,” I half lie.

It was a smashing success, at least from my point of view. You can still hear “Chicken Dance Elmo” demand that we “flap our wings,” but he sounds like he’s submerged in a bathtub, which is what I’d really like to do to him.

Next up, ear protection. I ordered reusable orange silicone SilentEar earplugs at the Ear Plug Superstore. They worked for a week or so. But they kept dropping out of my ear canals, and I was leaving behind a wake of plugs wherever I traveled. So I shelled out for a pair of Bose noise-canceling headphones. They cost a stress-inducing three hundred dollars.

I try them out on a plane to Atlanta, where I’m going on a business trip. I slip them over my ears, click the power switch, and . . . well, the world didn’t go silent. I can still hear the dinging seat-belt sign. But the headphones do turn the volume down from a ten to a seven. Life takes on a sort of a dreamy, uterine feel.

In the next few weeks, I start to wear my headphones more and more. They’re on my head right now, these big silver-and-black earmuffs. I resemble a baggage handler on the tarmac at JFK.

I wear them while working, while picking up my sons from school, while brushing my teeth. People ask, “What are you listening to?” Just the lovely sounds of silence, I say.

Julie has taken to calling me Lionel Richie, because I look like I just walked out of the recording studio for “We Are the World.” At least I’m 95 percent sure that’s what