"There's at least one thing that we hear that isn't a sound, and that's the silence that happens when sounds go away," said co-author Ian Phillips, a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Psychological and Brain Sciences. It was that the same illusions that scientists thought could only be triggered with sounds worked just as well when the sounds were replaced by silences. The idea wasn't simply that these silences made people experience illusions, the researchers said. They then listened for periods within those audio tracks when all sound stopped abruptly, creating brief silences. Participants were asked to listen to soundscapes that simulated the din of busy restaurants, markets, and train stations. If you can get the same illusions with silences as you get with sounds, then that may be evidence that we literally hear silence after all." "Our approach was to ask whether our brains treat silences the way they treat sounds. "Philosophers have long debated whether silence is something we can literally perceive, but there hasn't been a scientific study aimed directly at this question," said Chaz Firestone, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences who directs the Johns Hopkins Perception & Mind Laboratory. The fact that these silence-based illusions produced exactly the same results as their sound-based counterparts suggests that people hear silence just as they hear sounds, the researchers said. In the team's new silence-based illusion, an equivalent moment of silence also seemed longer than it really was. For example, one illusion made a sound seem much longer than it really was. The team adapted well-known auditory illusions to create versions in which the sounds of the original illusions were replaced by moments of silence. Video credit: Roy Henry/Johns Hopkins University
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