Do we only hear sounds? Or can we also hear silence? These questions are the subject of a centuries-old philosophical debate between two camps: the perceptual view (we literally hear silence), and the cognitive view (we only judge or infer silence). Here, we take an empirical approach to resolve this theoretical controversy. We show that silences can “substitute” for sounds in event-based auditory illusions.
I don’t have access to the full paper (I probably wouldn’t understand it anyway), but the idea that we can “hear” silence is pretty mind-blowing to me.
As someone with tinnitus, I was going to say that those of us with it definitely cannot hear silence. The sound I hear when it’s silent is definitely not the sound of silence because it is a sound I also hear when it is quiet but not silent. Some can hear it when it’s not even quiet.
I agree with ya. I can hear it whenever I intentionally seek it out, even when it’s relatively loud out there. I tend to think of it as some baseline intensity (at some extremely high frequency/frequensies I’ve tried but yet to pin down) my brain perceives, that gets washed out more as external stimuli become stronger. This is partly what prompted me to speak about a reference level of intensity distribution over frequency (and therefore a power spectrum if you will) in the other comment thread. Normal brains have a reference level that adapts to the environmental average. Those of us with tinnitus have some nasty spikes at high frequensies. “Hearing silence”, I speculate, is more of a response to a changing reference level – some of the responses will be the brain compensating for the change and thereby inducing acoustic (?) illusions reported in this work. A tinnitus brain will respond to a receding reference level by focusing again on those nasty frequency spikes.