Why is silence necessary for sleep?
In: Biology
Silence is not necessary for sleep. You may be used to sleeping with silence, so it works best for you. But if someone forced you to start sleeping with a TV on, for example, you would get used to it.
What really matters are *unexpected* sounds. Our brain filters all of our senses and stops paying attention to things that it gets used to. This is why you never see your own nose…until you look at it on purpose. You can *always* see your nose, but your brain ignores it because it would be annoying otherwise. And speaking of noses, we also go nose-blind to smells after a few minutes. I’m sure you have experienced that. You walk into a place and smell something, but later you don’t. The smell didn’t go away, you just stopped noticing it.
Your ears are the same. Noise that you have become used to just fades into the background. People often sleep with a TV or music playing on purpose because the distraction helps them drift off in peace. Some people live near outdoor noises like a busy road or train tracks, and they just get used to it.
Your ears and brain are never really turned off. Unexpected sounds will wake you up because your brain isn’t sure if it’s a sabre tooth tiger creeping into your cave to eat you.
It isn’t necessary. It’s just harder for us to calm down because our brains are wired from hundreds of thousands of years of humans being nomads that noise could mean danger. I used to go to sleep every night with the TV on.
It isn’t necessary, just might work better for you.
I actually sleep (and study) better with sound. Seems kind of oxymoronic, but with sound (music, tv, white noise, fans, etc) it gives me something to focus on, almost a meditation point. Eases my mind, lets me fall asleep fast.
With silence, I have no focus point, my mind races and I can’t fall asleep near as well.
Side note, studying was/is the same for me. Libraries were actually counter productive to my studying in college. But I had no problem sitting for 4-6 hours at a coffee house studying for tests.
White noise can be conducive to sleep.
I wear ear-plugs and run two fans, and I sleep like a baby.
so the brain can rest and isn’t stimulated by interpreting sounds and things and also ages ago it might have been an important thing in making sure we aren’t sleeping near predators and stuff
It definitely isn’t. I’ve slept many a hour in screaming engine rooms but you definitely have to get used to the noise.
In the good ol’days when a mammoth was feast for the whole village, sleeping was kind of risky, unless you had your mates about you you were very vulnerable asleep.
Which is why even while asleep it became necessary for us to mantain a semi-aware state, so that should a bear come by and try to attack us we would sense him (hopefully) before he did any damage. Detecting sounds even when you are asleep is an important part of that. And that is why silence brings comfortable sleeps. Because our brains have an additional layer of certainty that no danger lurks we can sleep more peacefully.
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