Tuning in to Your Most-Ignored Sense Can Make You Happier

Somewhere along the long, winding road of evolution, a bunch of genes got together in a conference room and decided it would probably be most optimal for human survival if we were forced to take in every sound all around us at all times. Thus, the ear was born. Unlike their neighbors the eyes, the ears came with no on/off option. This is a great safety feature if you’re living in a cave surrounded by predators, but it’s since been hijacked by a world in which you’re more likely to find yourself trying to sleep through a neighbor’s car alarm blaring at 1 A.M. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The constancy with which we experience sound even when unaware gives it an outsize place in the stream of information we use to understand the world around us. It also impacts the world within us: our emotional and physical well-being. For example, many of us live today in urban areas where the sounds of traffic, airplanes, crowded sidewalks, industrial machinery, and more are amalgamated into a sound salad that has been negatively linked not only to measures of mental well-being, but to more corporeal health consequences as well. Small-scale studies have traced traffic noise to worsened cancer outcomes and lower birth weights, and long-term noise exposure to male infertility. Though many studies on these crowded urban soundscapes include the effects of often-associated air pollution and other factors, the general evidence that what we hear is hurting u...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Mental Health Wellbeing Source Type: news