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.” “Our approach was to ask whether our brains treat silences the way they treat sounds. “Philosophers have long debated whether silence is something we can literally perceive, but there hasn’t been a scientific study aimed directly at this question,” said Chaz Firestone, an Assistant Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences who directs the Johns Hopkins Perception & Mind Laboratory. The fact that these silence-based illusions produced exactly the same results as their sound-based counterparts suggests that people hear silence just like they hear sounds, the researchers said. In the team’s new silence-based illusion, an equivalent moment of silence also seemed longer than it really was. For example, one illusion made a sound seem much longer than it really was. The team adapted well-known auditory illusions to create versions in which the sounds of the original illusions were replaced by moments of silence. The idea was to see if people’s brains treat silences the same way they treat sounds. In this experiment, Johns Hopkins University researchers substituted silences for sounds in a well-known auditory illusion. The research was published on July 10 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Surprisingly, what our work suggests is that nothing is also something you can hear.” But silence, whatever it is, is not a sound - it’s the absence of sound,” said lead author Rui Zhe Goh, a Johns Hopkins University graduate student in philosophy and psychology. “We typically think of our sense of hearing as being concerned with sounds.
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