The other day I was sleeping and my room mate shut the door across the hall. Normally is isn’t that loud, but it sounded like a gun shot and it woke me up.
In: Biology
There’s no objective measurement to how loud we perceive something as.
However, the reason it seems subjectively louder is because 1: there are typically no other sounds going on at the time (except for a fan or something to drown out other annoying sounds) and 2: when we are sleeping our ears are tuned in a lot more than we’d think to the surrounding environment. Our eyes are not giving us information while we are asleep, but evolutionary we would still need to know if a snake, lion, etc. were coming while we were asleep, so our hearing takes up some of the slack from our vision.
Your ears work as a mic, setting the volume quieter if it’s loud (to avoid going deaf, this is done both in the brain and withing muscles in the ear), and vice versa when your surroundings are quiet, where you sleep. Also when you’re asleep the senses are a bit more sensitive, it’s animal remnants.
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