Introduction
In today’s world it can feel like there’s no space for silence.
Like we’re always required to be responding to something,
to be saying something new.
Whether that’s answering a text or an email,
a tweet, a WhatsApp message or even the phone.
My name’s Harriet Shawcross. I’m a film-maker and a journalist
and I think we would all benefit
from a little bit more silence in our lives.
Why silence
One of the reasons I’m interested in silence
and in what can and can’t be said
is that when I was a teenager
there was about a year when I didn’t really talk to people at school.
I would answer direct questions if a teacher asked them
or I would read out loud,
but the kind of communication that makes us human –
spontaneous conversation, sharing jokes
was something that I wasn’t able to do.
And it had a huge impact on me and was really formative
in terms of how I relate to people both professionally and personally.
The benefits of silence
So what’s so great about silence?
Well in the course of researching my book
I came across several studies into the impact
that silence can have on both the body and the brain.
In one study involving mice,
silence was shown to promote the growth of brain cells
in the part of the brain responsible for memory related to the senses.
Scientists played mice a selection of sounds
including baby mouse cries, white noise, and silence
and observed that during silence
there was cell growth in the hippocampus.
Silence and the brain
Another study looked at the impact of listening to music on the body
and the researchers found that if silence was inserted
into a track of music
the blood pressure dropped, the heart rate reduced and the subject relaxed
much more than when listening to a relaxing piece of music.
This only happened when the silence
was inserted in the middle of the tune itself.
It didn’t work for silence at the beginning or end of the experiment.
So there’s something about silence that comes in the middle of noise
that’s particularly beneficial.
So silence can actually also enable people to actually say things
that they’ve never been able to say before.
I looked into the formation of the Samaritans,
a support service for people that are feeling despairing or suicidal.
The Samaritans
The service was set up in the 50s by a vicar,
and he started it because he had to conduct the funeral of a young girl
who had taken her own life.
The reason she took her own life is that she’d started her periods
and thought she’d contracted some terrible disease and was dying.
She was deeply ashamed of what was happening to her
and had no one to talk to about it.
It was this that inspired the vicar, Chad Varah,
to set up the Samaritans as he didn’t want people to feel
that there were things that they couldn’t talk about,
particularly things that they were ashamed of.
He believed that you should be able to sit with someone,
no matter what they’re going through, without feeling the need
to answer back or offer solutions or problem solve.
And a really central way of doing that is through using silence
and giving them space to explain what’s going on for them.
And frankly,
if normal conversations could involve a little bit more silence like that
I think the world would be a much happier place.
So silence is also at the heart of most major world religions.
In Buddhism silence is really highly valued
and conversation can be seen
as something that gets in the way of our experiences.
And if you strip away all of that language
you’re left with a deeper understanding of your own experiences
in the world and your connection to other people.
But can too much silence be a bad thing?
There’s a condition known as Assidy which was experienced by monks
who spent prolonged periods in silence
and it’s basically distinguished by a feeling of torpor,
of not being able to do anything
and that’s specifically associated with spending long periods of time
without speaking to anybody.
I also spoke to people who had spent more time
than probably most of us would want to in silence.
One of them was a Buddhist
who spent nine months on a silent and solitary retreat
and the silence had a really profound effect on him.
After a certain amount of time
he felt like he was losing control of both his mind and his body.
He actually felt like he was having a heart attack.
He knew logically he’d just pulled a muscle in his chest
but without anyone to say, “I’ve pulled a muscle in my chest” to,
the pain that he was feeling, the sensations of panic
meant that he actually really thought that he was dying
and the only way that he could snap out of that
was by calling a friend of his.
And it was only once he had words and language
to attach to what was happening to him
that he was able to make sense of it and eventually feel better.
So that Buddhist actually described silence to me as being like love –
it’s something that, instinctively,
we all feel we want and need in our lives
but silence, like love, is really strong medicine
and it can actually completely tear you apart.
