Why Silence Terrifies Us

von Boris Kriger

212 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

We tell each other that we crave silence. Then we buy machines that hum all night so we can sleep, leave the television talking to an empty room, and feel our pulse rise when a conversation stalls for four seconds. Both halves are true, and the contradiction is the subject of this book.Boris Kriger takes silence away from the wellness shelf and hands it to the engineers. Every sense we own comes equipped with elaborate machinery for surviving too much: the pupil narrows, the nose gives up on a smell within minutes, the ear protects itself, the mind learns to stop noticing the train. Against too little there is exactly one move available - turn up the gain - and gain applied to an empty channel amplifies the apparatus's own noise until that noise crosses the threshold and becomes content. The voice in the void is ours. It has always been ours. That is precisely why it frightens us.From the ear that audibly sings to itself, through the secret Montreal cubicle where a government paid to discover how quickly a bored student becomes a believer, to the red panic button that produced the symptoms of sensory deprivation in a well-lit room with a sandwich in it, this book follows a single question into medicine, broadcasting, prison, physics and the unanswered message on your phone. An empty channel is not a neutral emptiness. It is a discount offered to whoever speaks first.Along the way: why a moment of silence is bearable and a missing person is not, why the same tank is sold as torture and as therapy, why the unpublished result is the most dangerous silence in science, and what has to be written down in advance before an absence can tell you anything at all.Keywords: silence, sensory deprivation, psychology of perception, attention economy, uncertainty, neuroscience for general readers, solitude

• Reihe: Independently published
• ISBN: 9798175578769
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 19.09.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Independently published