Pursuit of Silence the Book in Pursuit

¶ … Pursuit of Silence

The book In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise is about the difficulties faced by modern people in a world that is full of cacophony. What author George Prochnik believes is that the world has changed in the recent past because there are no places you can go where you can have true silence. Prochnik surveyed men and women from many different aspects of society to try to find the importance that they place on sound and on silence. He further asserts that there is a real danger in this bombardment of sounds. This constant noise is creating in the body some severe ramifications in terms of the cardiovascular system, in terms of the mental processes of the human mind, and in the ways we converse, communicate, and debate with our fellow men and women.

The human body's cardiovascular system controls the way that blood is created in the heart and allowed to move throughout the body. There is also plenty of evidence that constant noise has a detrimental effect on the ability of human beings to hear. Modern people have personal music players such as iPods and MP3 players. People, particularly teens, are always listening to music, often at high volumes. This can lead to deterioration of hearing and eventual deafness (Prochnik 2011,-page 16). One scientist that Prochnik sites, Hefner, believes that there is almost a guarantee that headphones and personal listening devices will lead to hearing loss in the future. Headphones are particularly dangerous because they make it difficult to determine how loud the sound really is (page 59). Ultimately, the ear will only be able to pick up on loud noises and a great deal of the world will be lost to the hearer.

The human mind is composed of the brain and the mental functions of that organ. The brain controls all the functions of the organs within the body. One of the functions of the brain is allowing the person to concentrate on one activity or topic in order to comprehend information and to process that data. The constant barrage of noise, Prochnik argues, makes it difficult for the person to concentrate on one thing for any length of time. Unable to find locations of silence, the brain always has to either focus on ignoring the various noises in the environment or to try to listen to the sounds and perform the necessary tasks at the same time.

One of the people that are interviewed in the book is an astronaut. She shuts down much of Prochnik's incoming assumptions about the noise and silence of exploration in outer space. There was one moment that she reflects upon where she felt a great silence. It was a moment when NASA was not commenting via her microphone and blasting their voices directly into her ear. She says, "It was like putting on a pair of glasses…Everything, all at once so clear, like after a wonderful rainstorm" (Prochnik 2011,-page 10). Only able to hear herself breathing, the things she had been viewing for her entire outer space journey suddenly took on a new dimension when she was not encumbered with the sounds from the earth below. This goes to prove Prochnik's thesis that the sounds of the world alter our perceptions of the world. Only in silence can the brain shut out the split of their focus and allow them to see and observe with clarity.

Finally, the ever-present noise of the modern world has negatively affected the ways that human being communicate with one another. Prochnik is particularly concerned with the ways that the sounds affect the way we interpret and understand political discourse (page 267). Instead of carefully listening to all the speeches and promises of potential political leaders, the barrage of messages makes it so that only the people who speak the loudest are able to be heard above the din.