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.
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