that's the doors closing I'm on my own in an anechoic chamber so this is a room designed to have absolutely no noise they just turned the lights out so this is proper sensory deprivation I'm Marnie Chesterton.
You're listening to Crowd Science from the BBC World Service, which is about this.
Silence.
My quest this week is to find a little bit of peace and quiet.
Ideally, absolute silence.
And you'll be hearing more.
Or should that be hearing less from that anechoic chamber later on?
But of course, the reason for any crowd science adventure is always the curiosity of a listener.
So let's start there.
I'm Ziqi.
I'm from Shanxi, China.
I'm now living in Singapore for more than two years now.
My question is, why do we sometimes find silence so unbearable?
So you find silence uncomfortable.
Usually at home, when I'm at home alone,
I tend to leave the TV on just to have a little bit of background noise.
And the reason why I raise this question is that I figure out not just me, but my partner as well.
So our hypothesis is that actually maybe in the nature,
silence can be a sign of danger so that we try to avoid this.
Okay, I love that you and your partner have a hypothesis.