Take a trip to the quietest room on Earth where you can hear yourself blink

If you were asked where the quietest place on Earth is, you might answer: Antarctica or somewhere in the Sahara Desert, but you would be wrong.

It’s in Minnesota, where among the Orfield Laboratory’s many buildings is the Anechoic Chamber, a place so scientifically configured to absorb sound that a single blink becomes deafening.

Ambient noise inside the anechoic chamber is negative decibels – minus 24.9 dBA to be exact – which is a Guinness World Record and is so quiet that it is actually below the threshold of hearing human. With no noise of any kind, visitors, who sometimes can barely stand the silence, report hearing the minute functions of their bodies, such as blood circulation and blinking of the eyes.

“When it’s quiet, the ears adapt,” Steven Orfield, the lab’s founder, told Ted Thornhill of the Daily Mail in 2012. “The quieter the room, the more things you hear. You will hear your heart beating, sometimes you will be able to hear your lungs, hear your stomach gurgling loudly. In the Anechoic Chamber, you become the sound.

Part of what creates ambient sound is its reflection off the walls and glass, which typical rooms are made of. If one enters a recording booth covered in foam, one may notice that the audible sound levels drop or seem significantly muffled: this is because the foam inhibits the reflection of sound waves; but some are still able to bounce and create sound.

The Anechoic Chamber is a steel box suspended on springs inside a larger steel box. The inner box is lined with brown fiberglass ridges of varying sizes that completely neutralize sound waves of all different frequencies coming from any direction. These ridges even cover the ground and visitors stand on a suspended fence.

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Orfield says some people, probably city dwellers, can’t stand this for long. The typical visit lasts 90 minutes, including 20 minutes in the chamber. He says what most people don’t realize is that their movement coordination is deeply influenced by subtle sounds, and removing them completely means some people even have difficulty walking.

“You remove the perceptual cues that allow you to balance and maneuver,” he said. “If you stay in there for half an hour, you have to be sitting in a chair.”

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Some companies have used the chamber to test various things, for example Harley Davidson used it to dampen engine noise on a recent model, while NASA used it to help astronauts get used to the vacuum of the ‘space.

It’s a rather unique attraction for those visiting the Minneapolis area, and a full hour with up to four people in the room costs $400.

WATCH the action lab Explore the anechoic chamber, especially at 3 p.m. when they pop a balloon inside…

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