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Comment by ibaikov | Hacker News Reader

It's harmful to constantly hear sound, I wonder if it's our perception that makes it harmful even if we don't realize that we hear something? Is it harmful to hear sound threats outside of our range? Is it harmful to constantly use active noise cancelling?

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> It's harmful to constantly hear sound, [...]

Hmm I'm not so sure about that; do you have any source for that? My intuition says that it's nigh impossible to find completely quiet places in daily life; there's always some noise, though it could be imperceptably quiet.

If constant sound is harmful, I'd imagine we'd all have lost our hearing by now. I reckon any harm woulc come from volume, not just simple presence.

> If constant sound is harmful, I'd imagine we'd all have lost our hearing by now. I reckon any harm woulc come from volume, not just simple presence.

That's assuming it's physically harmful (to the ears). If it were instead mentally harmful, what you would expect is for the incidence of mental illness to increase as life got noisier and noisier (with a lag, of course, assuming this effect takes an appreciable amount of time).

> It's harmful to constantly hear sound

Are we saying our brain is not processing sound while we sleep? Ain't we hearing sound 24/7?

I am curious about ANC as well. I used to wear headphones with ANC 8h+ a day and started to hear noise in my ear.

I don't see why that would happen. ANC plays an inverted signal to counter noises. It's not just perception that it makes sound quieter. When the original sound wave and counter sound wave collide they physically cancel out.

If im understanding GP correctly, I think what's happening for them is that the extended quiet daily makes their hearing a bit more sensitive (as their brain and ears work in tandem to amplify the sound and be more receptive to it, respectively). Now when they take off the headphones, since their hearing is more sensitive, they pick up more of the actual background noise that exists around them.

Right, that's the ideal case. What might happen is that you get incomplete cancellation that varies with frequency; so you might get higher sound pressure at certain frequencies.

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