October 14, 2021 • 51 mins
If you’ve ever found your blood pressure rising because some guy down the street doesn’t know how to keep the trigger on a leaf blower pulled all the way, then you’ve experienced noise pollution. Not only is it annoying, it turns out it’s deadly too!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there,
and this is stuff you should know. Can I tell
people what just happened? Sure? After what going on? Fourteen
(00:26):
years coming up? Yeah? And I guess in April Jerry
hit record and you went, hey, everybody, Wait, I've been
having a lot of trouble with my brain lately. I
think I'm just hey, I think you're doing great. I
don't know if I told you, thank you. I think
you're doing great too. Um, I don't know if I
told you that I had trouble remembering how to um
(00:49):
what six plus seven added together to the other day?
That sounds familiar? That really bother? Yeah, and that's like
my favorite number, and it's like I just couldn't do it.
I was putting my daughter to bed the other night,
and as she was going to sleep, literally falling asleep, daddy,
(01:09):
what's four plus four? Eight? Was six plus two? It's
also eight? Okay. She's learning math, and you know that
first stuff you learn is literally just that simple addition,
and it's just funny to think about, like, wow, that's
what's on her mind right now. Yeah, but also she's
learning acceptance too, just unquestioning. Can I tell people how
(01:34):
you spelled this document that you sent my way for
this noise pollution episode? Sure? Boy, you're just playing it
all out there, aren't you. It was fun because it
looked like a heavy metal band. It was n O
I Z E p O I think it was p
O L l U s h U n Y and
(01:57):
looking at him and pay for I was like, oh, man,
that's that's a good bad band name. It is, like
that's a that's a good name for a made up
band in a movie like Wild Stallions. Yes, and yeah,
although that's tough to compete with, you know it is. Um.
I also think we should, uh, we should give a
little c o ay here. I think it's impossible for
(02:21):
you and I not to turn into old man complaining
about like loud music and loud mufflers and stuff in
this episode. So it's gonna happen. I think everybody who
knows us and saw the title of this one knew
it was going to happen. But let's just put it
on the table now. Well and It's also funny you
mentioned this because I did mention noise pollution. I introduced
that concept to my daughter the other day and said,
(02:45):
you know, she was like, well, what's that and I said, well,
it's it's as bad as trash on the road, but
it's noise that's doing it and you should be aware.
And she was like, okay, um. And I guess it
never occurred to me that like loud noises for kids,
unless it's something that really bothers them, it's just part
of life. Sure, it definitely seems to become more bothersome
(03:08):
the older you get. Absolutely. I think I don't know why,
but I'm going to hypothesize that it's because you grow
to learn that it doesn't have to be that way,
and if you come to really resent the things and
the people who are making it. So yeah, and I
think that's why people One reason people retire to the
(03:30):
country or something like that, if they've lived in the city,
their whole life just a little more tranquil, perhaps even
bucolic lifestyle quieter. And there's a lot of science behind
It's not just like oh, I don't want to hear
those noises. As you will see throughout this episode it
is it's bad for your health. Hey, speaking of retirement,
(03:50):
have you seen that documentary on the Villages? It is bonkers. Yeah,
I saw it um actually when I had COVID when
on a documentary binge, and that was one of them. Man,
it was like one of the most disturbing documentaries I've
ever seen, and I've seen like dear Zachary, and somehow
it was like up there with it. It was good
man that I mean, I don't want to give anything,
(04:12):
but the one guy that was you know, this sort
of discosta that was It's kind of funny at first,
but then that got really sad to a lot of
a lot of layers and all of it was incredibly
sad that it was highly recommended. Yeah, just bizarre, man.
And then I was watching the credits and I saw
Darren aaron Oski was an executive producer. I'm like, okay,
(04:35):
you go. Now, thing suddenly clicked a little more. I
thought a great idea for a movie would be a
setting like that. You couldn't call it that because it's
I'm sure proprietary, but the town said, yeah, a setting
just like that where they wake up one day and
there's been a murder and then like you know, col McLaughlin,
it's kind of a twin peaksy thing, you know, the
stranger from a strange land comes in to investigate a
(04:56):
murder in a very unlikely place and all the sort
of or does there I think that would be a
cool movie or TV show. Well, I mean that is
Twin Peaks basically, right, But you could if you said
it in a retirement community in Florida, people, you could
just walk away dust in your hands off, like job. Well,
there's plenty of things that have done this. It's not
just Twin Peaks, sure, I know, just nobody did it
(05:18):
better than Twin Peaks. I A um, alright, so noise pollution.
I think the fact of the podcast to me came
right up front, and that I never thought of the
fact that a decibel was a tenth of a bull
or a bell, which his name is DECI right there. Yeah,
I know, I've never thought of it either, because you
(05:38):
never hear of any other variation. It's like one decibel,
ten decibles, a hundred decibles, you know. Um. And apparently
a bowl or bell b E L is named after
Alexander Graham Bell too. I didn't know that either. And
the reason why we why a decibel is used, which
is one tenth of a bell um, is because a decibel,
(06:01):
a one tenth of a bell difference in sound is
the lowest, the smallest difference that humans can detect. So
we trade in decibles here on, and we trade in
an algorithm when we talked decibles, because it's one of
those weird things where it's not like a hundred decibles,
(06:22):
is it twice as loud as fifty decibles. It's spit
into an equation that's actually one dred thousand times as loud. Yeah,
So so like ten decibles, the difference between ten decibles
and twenty decibles is twenty decibles is ten times louder.
The difference between ten decibles and thirty decibles, thirty decibles
(06:42):
is a hundred times louder. It's logarithms and zero dbs
as we'll call them. That is the threshold of human
hearing period. And a hundred and forty decibels is about
where you can start to experience literal physical pain from
a sound. Yeah, I saw between a hundred and twenty
and a hundred and forty. Yeah, it ranges like uh,
(07:05):
I mean I've been to some loud concerts and small venues. Yeah,
Dinosaur Junior at Variety Theater was it for me. I
was just about to say, Dinosaur Junior, they're one of
the legendary loud bands. It was insane. It is super loud,
but it's not like I don't remember feeling pain, but
I do remember feeling discomforted a couple of these where
I was like, jeez, this is like I like my
(07:26):
music loud, but this is a little much. Dude. Yeah,
like I don't wear your plugs. I wore your plugs
in that. And I was like, I'm saving myself right now.
It was so loud, and I meant to say Variety
Playhouse is not Variety Theater. Yeah, because we played there before.
We don't want a dis no, I know you know that.
But all of this to say, um god bless Jay Mascus. Yeah, no,
(07:46):
it was great, but it was really loud. What about
this conversation that we're having. What is that? Well, it
depends a normal conversation something around sixty decibls. And I
saw that that's people standing about a meter apart um
speaking without raising their voices. That's sixty decibles right there.
For a reference, What about a car. Cars are about
(08:08):
ten times louder to ten hundred to a thousand times
louder than normal conversation, depending on the car of the truck,
between seventy and ninety deciples. What about an airplane, So
you would think, okay, a normal conversation is sixty decibles,
airplane being a hundred twenty desciples is twice as loud. No,
my friend, it's it's a hundred thousand times louder. An
(08:36):
airplane is a hundred thousand times louder than a normal
conversation if it reaches a hundred and twenty decibles. All right,
If you've ever been on a tarmac, uh like a
live tarmac and heard a plane kind of landing or
taking off, you that's just some loud stuff. Yes, and
that's why they wear those cans on their ears. Yeah,
they and they definitely should because we're starting to realize
(08:57):
that there's all sorts of hearing loss, sides of the
traditional ones that you can pick up on a regular
hearing test. There's something called hidden hearing loss that we're
just starting to get our mind around, where the structure
of your hearing apparatus in your ear, the little sillia
that's almost like a venus fly trap trigger hair, but
for sound instead. Um like, those things can be intact,
(09:21):
but the neurons that form the chain between your ear
and your brain can be permanently damaged so that the
sound that gets to your brain is garbled or or
partially missing. And that's a huge thing that can happen
at much lower intensity than than we understood before. And
speaking of intensity, I think we should say real quick,
(09:42):
a decibel to us humans, we we basically talk in
decibels as like a measure of volume, because that's what
it appears to like us, like an increase in decibels
is an increase in the volume of the sound. But
really what a decibels measuring is the intensity of the
disturbance of an air of the air that's something has made.
(10:03):
So if you're really close to that disturbance, it's going
to be a very intense exposure to your ear. If
you're further away, it's going to be a much less
intense intense exposure because it kind of dissipates over distances.
But to you, it's just registering is a difference in volume,
where really it's a difference in the intensity of the
wave that's being produced that's traveling through the air. That's right.
(10:25):
And uh, this is all sound. Yes, that's not noise.
Noise is different. Noise is what we're talking about. Mainly.
A noise is classified as unwanted sound. Yeah, that can
vary depending on who you are, obviously. Uh, you know,
the sound of your significant other's voice after forty years,
(10:47):
maybe noise to you asking for some tea. The sound
of a Harley Davidson motorcycle being rebbed up in front
of your house might be noise. Or those uh, those
blowers that used to hay until you love and use.
I still don't love it, and I went battery powered,
but it's still even while I'm using, I'm like, I'm
a terrible person. But you get it done quickly, probably right,
(11:10):
so quick, so quick. I'm like mincing and prancing, just
getting in ton Uh. And there's a lot of kinds
of different noise. Um. Sometimes, like let's say you work
in a in a machine shop or something and you
use a machine, like the the sound the machine makes
is like it's not necessary, but it's it's a byproduct. Uh,
(11:34):
it's a result of the machine. Working correctly. It's not like, well,
let's just make this thing loud. It's like, well, I'm
sorry that Jackammer is going to be loud, because that's
just the way it goes. My friends are are Jackammer.
Episode is fantastic. Um. So that sound isn't necessarily noise,
but the intensity and repetition of that sound makes it
becomes noise. Yeah. Yeah, it's an unwanted intensity, or it
(11:57):
can just the sound existing itself, like you're saying, like
a leafblower, just an unwanted existence of sound. So either way,
the operative thing is it's unwanted sound. That's the key, right. Yeah.
And and this is another cool fact of the episode
I think is that, uh they they think that as
late as through the nineteen forties and into nineteen fifty,
(12:20):
natural sounds were still the dominant sounds that you heard,
um and then things really changed. Yeah, because there's a
there's a big qualifier that a lot of researchers make
that and not everybody does, But that noise is by
definition human caused, like either we're yelling or whatever, um
or one of the machines that we've created is making noise.
(12:43):
But that you wouldn't say, like the sound of that
waterfall is noise. Like we don't think of like natural
sounds typically as noise. It's just sounds. And as we'll see,
it's probably because we have been living, like our species
has been living around those sounds and has definitively excluded
them as threatening, so that there they don't They don't
(13:05):
produce like an irritation in us. They just are sound,
almost regardless of how intense they are, right and that
and again that irritation is subjective because that rock concert
that I enjoy, someone else might call that noise. That uh,
that Space Shuttle launch that is super loud might be
(13:27):
noise to some people, but to others, you know, it's
the same sound, but they they don't think of it
as noise because they're excited and exhilarated in the moment
to see and hear that thing. Yeah. So you know
the other night, Uh, the inspiration for um crew came
back on the Dragon Capsule. Did you watch that? No?
(13:47):
Did you? Did you see it live? Uh? We didn't
see it because they splashed down in the Atlantic, but
we heard the sonic boom it made when it came
back into the atmosphere over Florida. It was a stounding
Did you see that sonic boom? No? I didn't. Oh,
it's really good. It starts off like, oh god, this
is not good. This is like a terrible corporate ad,
(14:08):
and then it really starts to find its feet. It's
it's crazy how it evolves over like just the first
couple episodes. I gotta see it. It's good. It's definitely
worth seeing. Um what other kinds of noise. You've got
industrial noise, which that's classified as kind of from the
beginning of the process all the way to the end
of any kind of industrial process, and that's basically called
(14:31):
continuous noise. Uh, from you know, raw materials all the
way to the to the end disposal of whatever byproducts
can usually cause a lot of racket. Yeah. So like
you know, like um, like a generator humming or something
like that. There's not a lot of variation in intensity.
It's basically this um or steam being released or even
(14:52):
like a rhythmic like um, like a like something being
like hammered, no, not hammered. That a difference that's called
the impulsive noise. But um, just something that doesn't really vary.
It's just kind of a monotonous sound. That's that's this
kind of a subcategory called continuous sound. And it just
so happens that most industrial processes are continuous in nature, right,
(15:17):
whereas a train going by your house, or a plane
flying or a car going by or a siren is intermittent. Yeah.
And then also you could probably say, like if you
held the trigger down on a backpack leafblower, um, which
again is the worst thing that anyone's ever invented, but
if you held it down, that would be a continuous
sound for the whole time it was going. But no
(15:39):
one does that ever. They just rev in this rhythmic
pattern that your brain is just just giving. It's all
to trying to try to find a pattern in. And
so you get worn out and irritated so quickly because
of those things, because they don't follow rhyme or reason.
And in conjunction with that, it's an intermittent sound, so,
(16:01):
which is, from what I can tell, one of the
worst sounds for us. Right. And then you've also got
community noise, which is just people noise. I think the
leafblowers are thrown into that lawnmowers. Uh. You know, if
you've got a festival in your neighborhood, or fireworks on
the Fourth of July, or people playing their music in
their cards and their houses. This is all just sort
(16:23):
of people generated, generated community sound. So those are basically
the three categories that I saw, industrial trafficking community. Should
we take a break? I think we should. All right,
We'll be right back. I'm gonna go quiet down that
racket outside. I'll be right back. Okay, do you finish
(17:04):
shaking your fist at those teenagers on your lawn. I'm
lucky because we don't have loud We don't have one
neighbor on one side, and our neighbor beside us is
pretty quiet. But I do live near and I've talked
about it before, a pretty main road, and you you
kind of get used to it. But I also yearn
you know, to be a few blocks in. But you know,
(17:24):
you can't pick up your house and move it. So
what are you gonna do? You get used to it?
You can, but it's really expensive. Well, no, that is true.
You can move a house sometimes. Didn't we do an
episode on that once? How to Move a House? Yeah?
I think I don't know if we did one just
on that. It may been like historic districts or something.
I don't know. And by the way, that episode we
couldn't think of the other day was crumple zones. Oh boys,
(17:47):
So we did do a whole episode on crumple zones.
We did. Boy, we were scraping the bottom of the
barrel there. But I remember that being an interesting episode though.
It was totally interesting. Well that's the stuff you should know, way,
isn't it, Chuck? Uh? It is? Indeed, should we talk
about hearing damage? Yeah, So, like I was saying, there's
that the kind of new type of hearing damage that
(18:08):
we're wrapping our minds around. That is like the death
of the neurons that are supposed to transmit the electrical
impulse to the brain, and so we don't hear very well.
Our our communication is garbled, and yet you can pass
a traditional hearing tests no problem. Um. But other research
is really starting to unfold, like less um less predictable
(18:32):
ways that that noise and noise pollution actually affects our health.
And it's like our entire system is negatively affected by
noise and noise exposure. It is, and it it basically
at the beginning of the whole process is triggering the
same exact thing that triggers your fight or flight response. Uh,
Like you're gonna have the same reaction to you know,
(18:55):
if you hear uh a siren go by, the same
thing is happening in your as far as your brain knows.
Then what happens if like a bear walks up to
you and roarers. Yeah, So, like our our hearing is
always on and it's always on the lookout for, um,
a potential threat. And one of the ways that a
(19:16):
potential threat can give itself away is by making a sound. Right.
It was, like I was saying earlier, Like we've been
around waterfalls and the sound of waves in our evolutionary
history for so long that basically it seems like when
you're born, you come equipped with this. Don't worry about
that sound. Actually you can be soothed by it. It's
not something that should stimulate your fight or flight response.
(19:37):
But we've lived around industrial machinery and the sound of
a text message or a leaf blower, the stupid leaf
blowers for such a little amount of our evolutionary history
that our minds are not at all attuned to those
things or um, we haven't kind of adopted this idea
that a leafblower is non threatening and so it stimulates
(19:59):
the fight flight response and is when we hear it.
That's right, So you're gonna hear that sound, you're amygdala,
which we've talked about plenty uh contributes to emotional processing,
is going to send that same distress signal to the hypothalamus. Again,
that gets if you are in a fight or flight response,
which is why you probably want to run screaming if
(20:20):
you here too many sirens, you're here too many leaf blowers,
and then that's gonna signal your adrenal glands to get
your adrenaline going. And I believe cortisol gets going as well.
It's like literally mimicking fight or flight. Yeah, And so
they figured out that like people who are continuously chronically
exposed to sound, like say people who live like really
(20:42):
close to an airport, really close to the subway tracks,
or um, people who work in a really noisy factory,
they have all sorts of crazy random health problems, like
their kids sometimes have low birth weight. Obviously, they can
develop tonitus um heart disease, obesity, diabetes, UH. There, their
(21:05):
children who are exposed to to chronic noise can have
UM cognitive impairments, um, high blood pressure, like all sorts
of crazy stuff. And so you think, well, okay, that's
that's like, that's terrible anybody who has to live near
noise or work near noise, like we should do something
about that. But it's even worse than that, Like, noise
pollution is even more insidious than that, because you don't
(21:27):
have to be chronically exposed to it. You don't have
to live in a place where you're like, this is
an objectively noisy place that I live or work in
to still suffer from the effects of noise pollution. Yeah,
I mean it can affect you when you're sleep because,
like you said, your ears are always on. It's not
like you go to sleep and the ears say, well,
I'm gonna take a nice break. That would be a
(21:49):
fantastic evolutionary addaptation. Actually, well, actually it would these days.
It wouldn't be the mountains, the mountain lions, saber tooth
tiger days. Yeah. Nice. If there was a switch and
you could kind of control that, it would be so nice.
I think the switches, the white noise wave machine is
that switch, Yeah, which I've gotten addicted to such that
(22:11):
I have to travel with him now. Yeah, everywhere I
go I've heard that. Yeah. Basically, once you start, you
can't go back. Yeah, I like it, though, I do.
Brown noise is my drug of choice. It sounds so
gross though brown. Yeah. I make a brown noise every morning,
you know what I mean? Wow, I was not expecting
danger Field to make an appearance. Well that's what you meant, right,
(22:34):
poop or no? Yeah, I mean I guess anytime I
hear brown, I think it's poop. You know, you think
of that or you think of ween the band, did
they have a brown song or album? They talk about
the brown thing, the brown sound, and brown is just
sort of their color and how they used to talk
about sound. And I've heard other groups talk about brown sounds.
So what does brown sound sound like? Well, brown noise,
(22:57):
you know if white noises, brown noises o middle. Yeah,
it's sort of a lower lower end. And if you
actually play it through a speaker, like if you put
it on your phone and play it through a little bluetooth,
you can get some good base and it just it
really works. Wonders for me. I should try brown noise
(23:17):
or even white noise. I've been using um chrome noise
where it's like, kid, do do do do do, And
it's really not helping me sleep at all. You're like,
you're like, I have the sound of a early Internet
connection being made a constant um. Did they ever name that?
(23:38):
They should have named that great? Yeah, I don't know.
I just call it whatever it was. They called it
the ticket wichet um. Interrupted sleep, though, that's that's the
big problem, or one of the big problems, because your
ears are always on. If you have uninterrupted sleep or
poor sleep overall, you're gonna be tired. Obviously, your creativity,
(24:00):
memory can get impaired. Your creativity is going to be low.
You're gonna have impaired judgment, your psychomotor skills might be impacted.
You might have more headaches. They've done studies. If you
live near airports and stuff like that, or uh, you know,
next to like a rail yard, you're gonna have more headaches.
You might take more sleeping pills as a result. Um,
(24:20):
you might be more prone to minor accidents, and you
are going to be more prone to seek uh psychiatric
treatment in your life. They like studies have shown this. Yeah,
there's a study of people living near European airports. They
found a tendestible increase in aircraft noise was associated with
a twenty eight percent increase in anxiety medication, and that
(24:42):
people um were also likelier to have more likely to
have symptoms of depression. So again all this is just
from like having not good sleep, which is bad enough,
but apparently Chuck it even gets worse because even if
your sleep isn't disturbed where you're waking up and not
getting sleep because of noise, like you get used to it,
(25:05):
the noise is still affecting you while you're sleeping because again,
your ear never turns off. It's always on the listen
out for some sort of threat creeping up on you.
And so if you're exposed to noise while you're sleeping,
it's still has that stress effect on you. And what
they've figured out is that one of the problems of
just being chronically stressed through something like noise and I
(25:28):
think stress in general, is that UM it affects I
think it's called the end athelium, which is the lining
of your blood vessels, and they respond to chemicals that
tell them to constrict to relax UM, and they get
constricted when they get stressed, when they're exposed to stress
like cortisol or something like that comes along and says constrict.
(25:50):
And when they do that, you get high blood pressure.
You can end up with heart disease, you can end
up suffering from heart attacks. And what's insane is they
figured out that after one night of being exposed while
you're sleeping to something like train sounds um your endothelium
it starts suffering, like it doesn't function as well after
(26:14):
just one night of that. Right, Like, isn't the idea
that you can have no other sort of poor health
markers and it can actually be brought on because of
this noise. Right, Yes, while you're sleeping, you're still getting sleep,
but it's still happening to you while you're sleeping. And
not only like high blood pressure um or um like
(26:34):
a heart attack or something like that coming down the road,
but also like diabetes, obesity. There's a lot of things
that we're figuring out are are tied to the lining
of the blood vessels and whether they're healthy or not.
It's a huge predictor of a whole range of diseases.
And when you hear noise, that's your stressors trigger your
(26:56):
endothelium to constrict, and that is a really bad thing.
It is um here in the United States. We kind
of started studying the stuff in earnest in the seventies.
That was when uh pollution was a big deal just
all around in the United States, and we started to
say things like, hey, maybe you shouldn't just um have
(27:16):
a family picnic and then just uh pick up your
blanket and dump all the trash on the ground like
they did on that episode of Madmen and on Anchorman
where they're all eating McDonald's And I saw a guy
throw a fully like McDonald's thing out the window day
the day and smashed on the sidewalk. Oh my god,
(27:37):
And I was just like, who who does that? Still, Yeah,
that's the problem is is we're at a place in
in our country's history where if you confront people like that,
there's a chance you're gonna get shot for confronting someone
like that. But I don't confront But that's like, that
isn't the kind of behavior you should under normal circumstances,
non shooting circumstances, feel perfectly fine confronting somebody about like
(28:00):
what what is wrong with you? Like we're so far
beyond that, Like everyone knows you shouldn't do that. It's
just insane. I got into a good fight with him
in my brain. Yes, I know, Like what, like, where's
the solution, where's the answer? I don't know, man. I
think the zen path is you go pick up that
McDonald's cup and throw it away and and say a
(28:22):
prayer for that person good luck. Uh So. Yeah. New
York uh is where they started studying this stuff in
the seventies because it was kind of wrapped up, like
I said, folded into larger pollution studies. They're like, well,
we might as well talk about noise pollution. New York
is a place to do it, and they did. There
were a couple of studies in the nineteen seventies about
(28:42):
subway noise that really sort of gave put the whole
thing on some terra firma as far as the health
effects and and and learning effects. In the case of
kids at PS ninety eight in Manhattan, it was very
close to the train tracks there, the subway train track close. Yeah,
like two twenty feet away. And they found and this
(29:05):
is this is pretty startling. They found that the kids
that were closest to the train tracks were eleven months
behind their classmates. That were on the other side of
the school. Yeah, on like not in another school, just
on the other side of the school. Yeah, almost a
full well, I mean that is basically a full school year,
(29:25):
because you know with summer's often stuff, that's an academic
year plus that they were behind. And they installed acoustic
tiles in the classroom and some dampening devices, and they
did a follow up study and the gap had closed basically,
So I mean there's proof right there, like your kids
are not learning as well if they're near that subway noise.
(29:46):
There's another kind of landmark study in the seventies in
New York that established the concept of noise pollution at
a place called the Bridges Apartment high rise or a
cluster of them in Manhattan that I believe I've maybe
drives under or really really close, um. And the traffic
(30:08):
noise is so bad that even as high up as
the eighth floor, the traffic sound is about the level
of a vacuum cleaner. And like just sitting in your
apartment you have to raise your voice to be heard, um,
which I mean, just the stress of that I can't imagine,
Like that's an inhabitable, uninhabitable place. I believe people are
(30:30):
still living there as well. UM. But the the this
this study found that children living there were far behind
it reading comprehension at listening comprehension uh, and just weren't
learning as as quickly as other kids their age who
did not live in the bridges. So those two studies
together from New York kind of established this idea like, Okay,
(30:53):
there's a there's a real problem with noise pollution UM.
And then it just went away for many, many years,
is until about two thousand eleven when the WHO. There's
a bunch of other studies, a lot of the other
ones that we've restaurant so far came out around two
thousand ten, two thousand eleven two. I'm not sure what
exactly kicked it off, but there was a big spade
of them. But then the WHO released a really big report,
(31:16):
not the WHO, the band, the World Health Organization. They're
another loud band actually, and UM, yeah, they felt terribly
guilty about causing hearing loss in their their fans, so
they launched the study of UM uh basically all of
Western Europe. UM. They looked at UM I think something
like five hundred different studies and did a meta analysis
(31:39):
of them to calculate what's called the disability adjusted life
years or dailies that were lost in Europe every year
two noise pollution. Yeah, And the idea of a daily
is they can't. They basically say, it's like the healthy
years of your life that are end up being lost
to this human made noise that you're living with. And
(32:04):
it's kind of a sort of an esoteric way to
think about it, but once you wrap your head around
it, it it makes a little bit more sense. But they
found that at least one million healthy years of life
are lost every single year only just in Europe due
to noise pollution. A million healthy years of people's lives annually. Yeah,
(32:25):
And that that means because of all of the disease
burden that noise pollution produces in humans, that that's how
much of our our healthy lifespan is shaved off every
year collectively, or how much Europe's is. And they did
a follow up study in two thousand and eighteen, Chuck,
and found that actually, no, we got it wrong. It's
one point eight million dailies are lost in Western Europe
(32:49):
alone each year. So they definitely established through these this
these couple of who studies like, no, noise pollution is
still a thing and we should probably do something about
on it. And there was another study that was released
this past year that said, yes, dailies are significant, but
we may have found a link that shows that noise
(33:09):
pollution can actually straight up kill you under some circumstances potentially. Yeah,
And this one was this is pretty startling because they
looked at herd Uh, well, not necessarily heart attack, but
nighttime deaths. No, I guess it was heart attacks. But
if you die overnight, die in your sleep quote unquote
from heart attacks. Uh, and the link to commercial aircraft
(33:34):
flying over your house, and I guess they had a
way to sort of cancel out all the other factors.
And they got down to the nitty gritty that three
of all nighttime deaths from heart attacks can be attributed
to the sound of aircraft flying overhead while you're sleeping.
That's just like that was it. That was the last
(33:54):
stress response that your body could handle, and you had
a heart attack and died from that sound. They said, like, Okay,
we found a definite correlation, but if there is causation here,
then we can chalk up about three percent of those
that's astounding. It is astounding. We're gonna take a break.
That's the human grossness, and we'll talk about the awful
(34:15):
things that we're doing to our animal friends in nature
right after this, all right, Uh, we talked about a
(34:45):
lot of studies that basically all added up to noise
pollution very bad for human beings, like literally bad for
their health. And and I know we've talked about a
few of these before over the years, especially when it
comes to whale. Uh, but all manner of mother nature
are impacted by this noise. They did a study in
(35:07):
the early two thousands about stress hormones um for what
kind of whales were they right whales? The right whales
in the Bay of Fundy, And they saw and this
was remarkable. They saw a really weird, unexplained declined in
the stress hormone concentrations that went away and then came
back up again. And they eventually realized it was a
(35:29):
halt in the shipping in the bay after eleven happened. Yeah,
because shipping is probably humans noisiest marine endeavor that we
do all the time constantly. And the idea of a
break and that having being connected to a huge decline
in stress hormones in whale poop. That's that's significant. But
(35:51):
it was an accidental discovery, and I think it led
other people to start studying stuff like that, like the
effects of noise on wildlife. And there was US I
think University of Idaho. I'm sorry. If it's Idaho State,
please don't be mad. I think it's okay. UM a
study from two thousand twelve where researchers set up like
what they call the Phantom Road, which is basically they
(36:14):
have fixed a line of loudspeakers to some trees out
in the wilderness that stretched about a half a mile
in length, and um, they just played road and traffic
noise and not like city stuff, just like the kind
of stuff that possibly a remote road through the wilderness
would sound like. Because they recorded it in Glacier National
(36:34):
Park on a road there, and just from that, just
from like this rural Glacier National Park road noise, something
like more than a quarter of all the birds in
the area just left. They were like, we're moving, We're
going to Canada. So everybody in the United States, Yeah,
you know, I think I definitely noticed, and I heard
(36:56):
other people talk about UM in like April of last
year when things really slowed down commuter and traffic wise
due to the pandemic. And I don't think it was
just um our our imaginations, but there were there was
a lot more bird activity going on. Uh. And I
remember I think I remember us even talking about it.
(37:19):
Um or maybe it was just quieter for us, so
we noticed the more or maybe a combination of both,
but there was there was a difference. And when you know,
when shipping stops after nine eleven or when um traffic stops,
nature says, oh uh, the the human a holes are gone.
Now we can start behaving normally again. Yeah, like things
(37:41):
are back to normal. Um. And that's I mean, that's
just on land. Also, they found that Idaho study found
that the birds that stuck around lost a bunch of
weight which they would have needed to migrate, so maybe
they couldn't leave even if they wanted to. But those
that was the land study. There's been other studies on land.
But it seems like the the we're doing a lot
of damage to marine ecosystems as well, like probably even
(38:04):
more because sound waves travel and water a lot better
than light, which means that most of the animals that
live in the water have really sensitive hearing. That's what
they've evolved to use to communicate and listen out for, right,
So when we make noise, it's really problematic and marine ecosystems, Yeah,
and we make a lot of noise. I mean that
shipping activity we talked about is super disruptive to anything underwater.
(38:30):
When they search for mineral deposits on the sea floor
or under the sea floor, they use these seismic air
guns that are you can hear those things like a
fish can hear that a thousand, thousands of miles away.
Very disruptive. Um, sonar and no We talked about sonar
in in an episode years ago and how that affected
marine life. I can't remember what it was. Did we
(38:52):
do an entire episode on the time they blew up
the beach to whale? Like what to do with the
beach whale? Maybe? I think, but they basically kind of
say now, like they think the reasons Wales beach themselves
is because of these noises and sonar as a big culprit, right, Um,
like it just drives him out of the water, which
sounds bonkers, But if you ever think about how humans
(39:13):
sometimes jump from tall buildings rather than being burned by
the intensity of a fire. I think it's virtually the
same principle. Sure, so we are we have become aware
of just how much noise pollution affects, not just us,
but the environment as well. Like it's it is a
form of pollution. Um. And it seems like you know,
(39:34):
it started to accumulate in the last few years, but
really we've known for a good fifty years that noise
pollution is really bad for everybody. Uh, and yet we've
done almost nothing about it. But we had the start, Chuck,
We started out like we were going to like almost
immediately when we realized how bad noise pollution was in
the seventies, we started to do something about it um
(39:58):
and the federal government passed like th and actually I
saw a fourth one um huge acts that had to
do with basically controlling noise pollution. Yeah, either controlling noise
pollution for people in general, or through OSHA, making sure
people were working in safe conditions or at least had
you know, the ear cans and things they needed to
work safely. And it was, like you said, it was
(40:19):
headed in the right direction. We knew it was bad
and we were trying to stop it. And then the
Reagan administration came along and said, nuts to that, that's
federal regulation. Let's just leave it to the states, because
you ask any governor of any state and they'll tell
you their citizens know to do the right thing, and
they'll do that right thing. And uh so we'll just
(40:40):
leave it up to the states and let them. Uh
they volunteered to face itself out. The Office of Noise
and Abatement Control, uh on paper still exists, but Congress said,
you know, let's just not fund them anymore and let's
keep these laws on the books, but really not worry
about it too much because the states will take care
of it, right, because states always do the right thing. Yeah,
And the states, of course, did absolutely nothing, and it's
(41:01):
partially because they can't do a lot about it. A
lot of noise is really best understood, studied, and regulated
by the federal government. Like what like Georgia has a
bunch of money reserve to study the effects of noise
on humans. Like, no, that's totally a federal kind of
thing to do, you know. And that's what some of
(41:21):
those seventies acts set up, like that, that Office of
Noise Abatement and Control or noise control in abatement, like
it's purpose was to study that kind of stuff. That's
not what states do. So the states have, well not
the states, but usually more municipalities and counties have. They
have taken steps to kind of mitigate sound pollution. Like
there's your noise pollution. There's usually regulations on how early
(41:45):
or late a landscaping crew can work within the city limits,
or some of them say like you can't boom your
stereo or you're not allowed to have that broken glass
muffler on your Harley. Um, like, there's some stuff like that.
But then like if you live kind of under a
flight path, if your town wanted to say, you know what,
you can't fly over our town and wake everybody up
(42:07):
between you know, twelve at night and seven in the morning,
you can't fly an airplane over it. The airplanes would
just be like like, I didn't hear you. Sorry, I
was listening to the Feds who say you can't make
laws like that. Yeah, And you know, I get the feeling.
With municipalities. It is more like complaints from neighbors kind
of noise or the lawn cruise in construction like you
(42:30):
were saying, and less like stuff with big teeth um recently,
Uh weird reason I won't get into, but I was
looking up noise ordinances and Athens, Georgia, and they're kind
of funny when you look at these noise ordinances. It's
like it literally said, like you know, walking down the
sidewalk um yelling at one another, talking about basically drunk kids,
(42:52):
you know, like the French quarter kind of thing. Uh.
It said, you know, this includes hooting and hollering, and
it was something about being able to hear you from
like three feet away, but or noise from your apartment.
But it's you know, it's like good luck with that.
Like you can call the cops on someone maybe, but
there's no teeth or or or what do you call
(43:15):
it when you or enforcement kind of with a lot
of this stuff, aside from singling out people when it
happens in the moment, and you may get a cop
come by and say turn it down. But even if
there's a will to do something, it depends on if
it's like rail traffic or air traffic, like the federal um,
the federal government ties local local towns and counties hands
(43:36):
like they can't do anything about it, and there's um
as a result, there's a lot of noise pollution that
people can't do anything about. There's a um. There's a
town in Canada. I can't remember the name of it,
but it is um. It's got really like a rail
system that goes through it, and it doesn't have like
alarms or like the arms that come down. So trains
(43:57):
have to hank their horns at least three times as
they crossed through this town. And there's a bunch of
different crossings, and they calculated that train horns blair twelve
hundred times a day in this little tiny town. And like,
obviously everybody's going nuts, but they can't do anything about
it because the federal government of Canada is in charge
(44:20):
of regulating rail travel like every other developed or industrialized country. Yeah,
and even if it's something like Osha and like you,
you work in allowed factory and they're trying to regulate that,
they say that a they don't cover all industries they
should cover, and when when they do, it's very inconsistently applied.
And even when they do apply it inconsistently. Um, they
(44:43):
say that these limits aren't even low enough to protect
all the workers anyway from hearing loss said, OSHA regulations
allow workers to be exposed to ninety five decibels for
four hours a day, five days a week, for your
entire forty year career, and that that that's like you're
going to suffer from hearing loss if that's the case. Yeah,
(45:04):
that's like holding a leafblower right right next to you
for four hours a day, five days a week for
forty years. Like of course you're going to lose you're hearing. Like,
that's that's crazy. Well, and then fact you're in the
other health effects that no one ever talks about that
we mentioned in the whole first half of this thing.
And you have an unhealthy population if you're stuck in
one of those places. So we can sit here and
(45:25):
corvetch all day, which we we would love to do.
But there are solutions to this, but we I want
to point out one more time, all these solutions are
zero thanks to the Reagan administration. Um. Instead, there's some
simple stuff you can do to help us humans, Like
you can change aircraft routes, you can build barriers along
roadways and railways. UM. You can even green it up,
(45:47):
like they found that if you use shrubbery and trees
mixed together so that they basically produce a fence, and
you plant them close to the road or close to
the railway rather than close to the place that you're
trying to protect. They do pretty good at reducing the
decibels of the sound the noise pollution coming from the traffic. Um,
(46:07):
that's some easy stuff you can do. And then on
the user end, on the individuals, and there's all sorts
of like acoustic insulation and paneling you can add to
your house to make it a little more soundproof and quieter. Um,
what about those mufflers chuck car mufflers. Yeah, so apparently
the ones that make the sound or not not they're
(46:28):
not good. Yeah, I mean that they could they could
change that. The e p A could get involved and say,
you know what, you can't have those kind of mufflers anymore.
Thank god if they did. As far as the shipping go,
and know, it's always like a Honda Civic or something
that it's like tricked out, like it's some kind of
race car um. As far as the water goes in
(46:49):
the shipping stuff like that. Those big ships, Uh, they
found that if they separate the ship's engine from the hull. Uh,
they are quieter, much quieter, and they even found that
there is uh. I think there's a se reduction in
acoustic energy um six to eight decibels, which is significant. Uh.
And they also found that it is less fuel efficient.
(47:12):
And if they like retrofitted or kind of change the
way they built these ships, I don't know if you can, well,
I guess you can retrofit something. Well, yeah, the propellers
are what's making them less fuel efficient, so you can
easy not easily, but you can take off the old
propellers and put on new ones. Right, But it costs
a lot of money up front, like they will save
in the long run. And I think uh is it
pronounced Marsk, the big shipping company. They spent a hundred
(47:34):
million bucks to do just eleven of its ships, So
that gives you the idea of how much it costs. Uh.
There may be seen some efficiencies if they did more
or something, but it's not cheap. And they have seven
forty ships they've done eleven, so well, I did see
that is actually a very small fraction of all of
the ships involved in shipping that are responsible for the
(47:56):
vast majority of the noise. So if you did just
focus on the worst offenders that would have a significant impact. Yeah,
there's also a huge amount of noise, apparently underwater noise
that comes from offshore wind farms because of the pile
driver that is moved by up and down by the
blades to help produce the electricity to move the turbine right,
(48:20):
And they found that if you just put a perforated
pipe around the pile driver, the pile driver is going
to produce bubbles and those bubbles will dissipate the noise.
Almost all the noise I think like of the noise
coming from those offshore wind farms. That's a really simple,
easy solution. Just do it people. Yeah, and there's one
other thing that I hadn't thought about, but I saw
(48:40):
a couple of places and it really makes sense, is
that the noise pollution we're contributing to marine ecosystems in
particular is just such low hanging fruit that there's no
reason we shouldn't do this. There's some really easy stuff
we can do, like even rerouting shipping lanes is one
thing we can do, and that by doing that it
will actually stabilize marine ecosystems in marine life so that
(49:05):
it will buy us a little time while we're figuring
out much trickier stuff like ocean acidification and things that
are also threats to it. So it's like, just removing
noise pollution would really go a long way toward extending
the UM. I guess the health and vitality of the
oceans while there, you know, while we're combating climate change.
(49:26):
I love it. Let's get all these things going. Our
health is suffering. Let's start with the mufflers. Yeah, that's
just annoyance. Uh. Well, since Chuck said that's just annoyance,
of course, everybody, that means it's time for listener mail. Uh.
This one's pretty short and sweet. I just love it
when we get an answer about something. I think I
(49:47):
might have known this at some point, but we talked
about shrinking as humans. And this is from uh Steve
and Roscoe, Illinois. He says, I've been a long time listener,
never had a reason to reach out, but you my
Arab expertise. I'm a physical therapist, and while listening to
episode about crash testing, you ask why do we shrink
when we get older? What happens is we age, guys,
(50:09):
is the intervertebral discs in our back lose hydration and
as a result, we shrink. Uh. There are six discs
in the cervical spine, twelve discs in the thoracic spine,
and five discs in the lumbar. If each disc were
to lose a minimum of one six of an inch
in height, that adds up pretty quickly, and you can
(50:29):
easily lose an inch plus in your lifetime. The other
thing to consider as we age is our muscles and
tissues get tighter, pulls us into positions of poor posture.
That's right, and this restricts our ability to stand up straight.
You can bind all these things together and all of
a sudden, Josh isn't going to hit his goal height
of six ft. I have to stay on my tippy toes.
(50:50):
New thanks for all the good work. I hope it
didn't step on the toes of a future short stuff.
I think we just did it. Steve. That's Steve Marima
or Marima from Rusco in a way. Thanks a lot, Steve,
that was a good email. We appreciate that big time.
And if you haven't stumbled upon it yet, you should
check out our episode Encarcopania. It is old, but it
(51:11):
was interesting. Yeah, if you have any ethysical therapy needs
in Illinois. Give Steve a cal sounds good guy, Yeah,
head to beautiful Roscoe, Illinois. Come on, if you want
to be like Steve from Roscoe and uh give us
some more info that we were asking for. We love
that kind of stuff. You can send it to his
(51:31):
via email to stuff Podcasts at iHeart radio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there,
and this is stuff you should know. Can I tell
people what just happened? Sure? After what going on? Fourteen
(00:26):
years coming up? Yeah? And I guess in April Jerry
hit record and you went, hey, everybody, Wait, I've been
having a lot of trouble with my brain lately. I
think I'm just hey, I think you're doing great. I
don't know if I told you, thank you. I think
you're doing great too. Um, I don't know if I
told you that I had trouble remembering how to um
(00:49):
what six plus seven added together to the other day?
That sounds familiar? That really bother? Yeah, and that's like
my favorite number, and it's like I just couldn't do it.
I was putting my daughter to bed the other night,
and as she was going to sleep, literally falling asleep, daddy,
(01:09):
what's four plus four? Eight? Was six plus two? It's
also eight? Okay. She's learning math, and you know that
first stuff you learn is literally just that simple addition,
and it's just funny to think about, like, wow, that's
what's on her mind right now. Yeah, but also she's
learning acceptance too, just unquestioning. Can I tell people how
(01:34):
you spelled this document that you sent my way for
this noise pollution episode? Sure? Boy, you're just playing it
all out there, aren't you. It was fun because it
looked like a heavy metal band. It was n O
I Z E p O I think it was p
O L l U s h U n Y and
(01:57):
looking at him and pay for I was like, oh, man,
that's that's a good bad band name. It is, like
that's a that's a good name for a made up
band in a movie like Wild Stallions. Yes, and yeah,
although that's tough to compete with, you know it is. Um.
I also think we should, uh, we should give a
little c o ay here. I think it's impossible for
(02:21):
you and I not to turn into old man complaining
about like loud music and loud mufflers and stuff in
this episode. So it's gonna happen. I think everybody who
knows us and saw the title of this one knew
it was going to happen. But let's just put it
on the table now. Well and It's also funny you
mentioned this because I did mention noise pollution. I introduced
that concept to my daughter the other day and said,
(02:45):
you know, she was like, well, what's that and I said, well,
it's it's as bad as trash on the road, but
it's noise that's doing it and you should be aware.
And she was like, okay, um. And I guess it
never occurred to me that like loud noises for kids,
unless it's something that really bothers them, it's just part
of life. Sure, it definitely seems to become more bothersome
(03:08):
the older you get. Absolutely. I think I don't know why,
but I'm going to hypothesize that it's because you grow
to learn that it doesn't have to be that way,
and if you come to really resent the things and
the people who are making it. So yeah, and I
think that's why people One reason people retire to the
(03:30):
country or something like that, if they've lived in the city,
their whole life just a little more tranquil, perhaps even
bucolic lifestyle quieter. And there's a lot of science behind
It's not just like oh, I don't want to hear
those noises. As you will see throughout this episode it
is it's bad for your health. Hey, speaking of retirement,
(03:50):
have you seen that documentary on the Villages? It is bonkers. Yeah,
I saw it um actually when I had COVID when
on a documentary binge, and that was one of them. Man,
it was like one of the most disturbing documentaries I've
ever seen, and I've seen like dear Zachary, and somehow
it was like up there with it. It was good
man that I mean, I don't want to give anything,
(04:12):
but the one guy that was you know, this sort
of discosta that was It's kind of funny at first,
but then that got really sad to a lot of
a lot of layers and all of it was incredibly
sad that it was highly recommended. Yeah, just bizarre, man.
And then I was watching the credits and I saw
Darren aaron Oski was an executive producer. I'm like, okay,
(04:35):
you go. Now, thing suddenly clicked a little more. I
thought a great idea for a movie would be a
setting like that. You couldn't call it that because it's
I'm sure proprietary, but the town said, yeah, a setting
just like that where they wake up one day and
there's been a murder and then like you know, col McLaughlin,
it's kind of a twin peaksy thing, you know, the
stranger from a strange land comes in to investigate a
(04:56):
murder in a very unlikely place and all the sort
of or does there I think that would be a
cool movie or TV show. Well, I mean that is
Twin Peaks basically, right, But you could if you said
it in a retirement community in Florida, people, you could
just walk away dust in your hands off, like job. Well,
there's plenty of things that have done this. It's not
just Twin Peaks, sure, I know, just nobody did it
(05:18):
better than Twin Peaks. I A um, alright, so noise pollution.
I think the fact of the podcast to me came
right up front, and that I never thought of the
fact that a decibel was a tenth of a bull
or a bell, which his name is DECI right there. Yeah,
I know, I've never thought of it either, because you
(05:38):
never hear of any other variation. It's like one decibel,
ten decibles, a hundred decibles, you know. Um. And apparently
a bowl or bell b E L is named after
Alexander Graham Bell too. I didn't know that either. And
the reason why we why a decibel is used, which
is one tenth of a bell um, is because a decibel,
(06:01):
a one tenth of a bell difference in sound is
the lowest, the smallest difference that humans can detect. So
we trade in decibles here on, and we trade in
an algorithm when we talked decibles, because it's one of
those weird things where it's not like a hundred decibles,
(06:22):
is it twice as loud as fifty decibles. It's spit
into an equation that's actually one dred thousand times as loud. Yeah,
So so like ten decibles, the difference between ten decibles
and twenty decibles is twenty decibles is ten times louder.
The difference between ten decibles and thirty decibles, thirty decibles
(06:42):
is a hundred times louder. It's logarithms and zero dbs
as we'll call them. That is the threshold of human
hearing period. And a hundred and forty decibels is about
where you can start to experience literal physical pain from
a sound. Yeah, I saw between a hundred and twenty
and a hundred and forty. Yeah, it ranges like uh,
(07:05):
I mean I've been to some loud concerts and small venues. Yeah,
Dinosaur Junior at Variety Theater was it for me. I
was just about to say, Dinosaur Junior, they're one of
the legendary loud bands. It was insane. It is super loud,
but it's not like I don't remember feeling pain, but
I do remember feeling discomforted a couple of these where
I was like, jeez, this is like I like my
(07:26):
music loud, but this is a little much. Dude. Yeah,
like I don't wear your plugs. I wore your plugs
in that. And I was like, I'm saving myself right now.
It was so loud, and I meant to say Variety
Playhouse is not Variety Theater. Yeah, because we played there before.
We don't want a dis no, I know you know that.
But all of this to say, um god bless Jay Mascus. Yeah, no,
(07:46):
it was great, but it was really loud. What about
this conversation that we're having. What is that? Well, it
depends a normal conversation something around sixty decibls. And I
saw that that's people standing about a meter apart um
speaking without raising their voices. That's sixty decibles right there.
For a reference, What about a car. Cars are about
(08:08):
ten times louder to ten hundred to a thousand times
louder than normal conversation, depending on the car of the truck,
between seventy and ninety deciples. What about an airplane, So
you would think, okay, a normal conversation is sixty decibles,
airplane being a hundred twenty desciples is twice as loud. No,
my friend, it's it's a hundred thousand times louder. An
(08:36):
airplane is a hundred thousand times louder than a normal
conversation if it reaches a hundred and twenty decibles. All right,
If you've ever been on a tarmac, uh like a
live tarmac and heard a plane kind of landing or
taking off, you that's just some loud stuff. Yes, and
that's why they wear those cans on their ears. Yeah,
they and they definitely should because we're starting to realize
(08:57):
that there's all sorts of hearing loss, sides of the
traditional ones that you can pick up on a regular
hearing test. There's something called hidden hearing loss that we're
just starting to get our mind around, where the structure
of your hearing apparatus in your ear, the little sillia
that's almost like a venus fly trap trigger hair, but
for sound instead. Um like, those things can be intact,
(09:21):
but the neurons that form the chain between your ear
and your brain can be permanently damaged so that the
sound that gets to your brain is garbled or or
partially missing. And that's a huge thing that can happen
at much lower intensity than than we understood before. And
speaking of intensity, I think we should say real quick,
(09:42):
a decibel to us humans, we we basically talk in
decibels as like a measure of volume, because that's what
it appears to like us, like an increase in decibels
is an increase in the volume of the sound. But
really what a decibels measuring is the intensity of the
disturbance of an air of the air that's something has made.
(10:03):
So if you're really close to that disturbance, it's going
to be a very intense exposure to your ear. If
you're further away, it's going to be a much less
intense intense exposure because it kind of dissipates over distances.
But to you, it's just registering is a difference in volume,
where really it's a difference in the intensity of the
wave that's being produced that's traveling through the air. That's right.
(10:25):
And uh, this is all sound. Yes, that's not noise.
Noise is different. Noise is what we're talking about. Mainly.
A noise is classified as unwanted sound. Yeah, that can
vary depending on who you are, obviously. Uh, you know,
the sound of your significant other's voice after forty years,
(10:47):
maybe noise to you asking for some tea. The sound
of a Harley Davidson motorcycle being rebbed up in front
of your house might be noise. Or those uh, those
blowers that used to hay until you love and use.
I still don't love it, and I went battery powered,
but it's still even while I'm using, I'm like, I'm
a terrible person. But you get it done quickly, probably right,
(11:10):
so quick, so quick. I'm like mincing and prancing, just
getting in ton Uh. And there's a lot of kinds
of different noise. Um. Sometimes, like let's say you work
in a in a machine shop or something and you
use a machine, like the the sound the machine makes
is like it's not necessary, but it's it's a byproduct. Uh,
(11:34):
it's a result of the machine. Working correctly. It's not like, well,
let's just make this thing loud. It's like, well, I'm
sorry that Jackammer is going to be loud, because that's
just the way it goes. My friends are are Jackammer.
Episode is fantastic. Um. So that sound isn't necessarily noise,
but the intensity and repetition of that sound makes it
becomes noise. Yeah. Yeah, it's an unwanted intensity, or it
(11:57):
can just the sound existing itself, like you're saying, like
a leafblower, just an unwanted existence of sound. So either way,
the operative thing is it's unwanted sound. That's the key, right. Yeah.
And and this is another cool fact of the episode
I think is that, uh they they think that as
late as through the nineteen forties and into nineteen fifty,
(12:20):
natural sounds were still the dominant sounds that you heard,
um and then things really changed. Yeah, because there's a
there's a big qualifier that a lot of researchers make
that and not everybody does, But that noise is by
definition human caused, like either we're yelling or whatever, um
or one of the machines that we've created is making noise.
(12:43):
But that you wouldn't say, like the sound of that
waterfall is noise. Like we don't think of like natural
sounds typically as noise. It's just sounds. And as we'll see,
it's probably because we have been living, like our species
has been living around those sounds and has definitively excluded
them as threatening, so that there they don't They don't
(13:05):
produce like an irritation in us. They just are sound,
almost regardless of how intense they are, right and that
and again that irritation is subjective because that rock concert
that I enjoy, someone else might call that noise. That uh,
that Space Shuttle launch that is super loud might be
(13:27):
noise to some people, but to others, you know, it's
the same sound, but they they don't think of it
as noise because they're excited and exhilarated in the moment
to see and hear that thing. Yeah. So you know
the other night, Uh, the inspiration for um crew came
back on the Dragon Capsule. Did you watch that? No?
(13:47):
Did you? Did you see it live? Uh? We didn't
see it because they splashed down in the Atlantic, but
we heard the sonic boom it made when it came
back into the atmosphere over Florida. It was a stounding
Did you see that sonic boom? No? I didn't. Oh,
it's really good. It starts off like, oh god, this
is not good. This is like a terrible corporate ad,
(14:08):
and then it really starts to find its feet. It's
it's crazy how it evolves over like just the first
couple episodes. I gotta see it. It's good. It's definitely
worth seeing. Um what other kinds of noise. You've got
industrial noise, which that's classified as kind of from the
beginning of the process all the way to the end
of any kind of industrial process, and that's basically called
(14:31):
continuous noise. Uh, from you know, raw materials all the
way to the to the end disposal of whatever byproducts
can usually cause a lot of racket. Yeah. So like
you know, like um, like a generator humming or something
like that. There's not a lot of variation in intensity.
It's basically this um or steam being released or even
(14:52):
like a rhythmic like um, like a like something being
like hammered, no, not hammered. That a difference that's called
the impulsive noise. But um, just something that doesn't really vary.
It's just kind of a monotonous sound. That's that's this
kind of a subcategory called continuous sound. And it just
so happens that most industrial processes are continuous in nature, right,
(15:17):
whereas a train going by your house, or a plane
flying or a car going by or a siren is intermittent. Yeah.
And then also you could probably say, like if you
held the trigger down on a backpack leafblower, um, which
again is the worst thing that anyone's ever invented, but
if you held it down, that would be a continuous
sound for the whole time it was going. But no
(15:39):
one does that ever. They just rev in this rhythmic
pattern that your brain is just just giving. It's all
to trying to try to find a pattern in. And
so you get worn out and irritated so quickly because
of those things, because they don't follow rhyme or reason.
And in conjunction with that, it's an intermittent sound, so,
(16:01):
which is, from what I can tell, one of the
worst sounds for us. Right. And then you've also got
community noise, which is just people noise. I think the
leafblowers are thrown into that lawnmowers. Uh. You know, if
you've got a festival in your neighborhood, or fireworks on
the Fourth of July, or people playing their music in
their cards and their houses. This is all just sort
(16:23):
of people generated, generated community sound. So those are basically
the three categories that I saw, industrial trafficking community. Should
we take a break? I think we should. All right,
We'll be right back. I'm gonna go quiet down that
racket outside. I'll be right back. Okay, do you finish
(17:04):
shaking your fist at those teenagers on your lawn. I'm
lucky because we don't have loud We don't have one
neighbor on one side, and our neighbor beside us is
pretty quiet. But I do live near and I've talked
about it before, a pretty main road, and you you
kind of get used to it. But I also yearn
you know, to be a few blocks in. But you know,
(17:24):
you can't pick up your house and move it. So
what are you gonna do? You get used to it?
You can, but it's really expensive. Well, no, that is true.
You can move a house sometimes. Didn't we do an
episode on that once? How to Move a House? Yeah?
I think I don't know if we did one just
on that. It may been like historic districts or something.
I don't know. And by the way, that episode we
couldn't think of the other day was crumple zones. Oh boys,
(17:47):
So we did do a whole episode on crumple zones.
We did. Boy, we were scraping the bottom of the
barrel there. But I remember that being an interesting episode though.
It was totally interesting. Well that's the stuff you should know, way,
isn't it, Chuck? Uh? It is? Indeed, should we talk
about hearing damage? Yeah, So, like I was saying, there's
that the kind of new type of hearing damage that
(18:08):
we're wrapping our minds around. That is like the death
of the neurons that are supposed to transmit the electrical
impulse to the brain, and so we don't hear very well.
Our our communication is garbled, and yet you can pass
a traditional hearing tests no problem. Um. But other research
is really starting to unfold, like less um less predictable
(18:32):
ways that that noise and noise pollution actually affects our health.
And it's like our entire system is negatively affected by
noise and noise exposure. It is, and it it basically
at the beginning of the whole process is triggering the
same exact thing that triggers your fight or flight response. Uh,
Like you're gonna have the same reaction to you know,
(18:55):
if you hear uh a siren go by, the same
thing is happening in your as far as your brain knows.
Then what happens if like a bear walks up to
you and roarers. Yeah, So, like our our hearing is
always on and it's always on the lookout for, um,
a potential threat. And one of the ways that a
(19:16):
potential threat can give itself away is by making a sound. Right.
It was, like I was saying earlier, Like we've been
around waterfalls and the sound of waves in our evolutionary
history for so long that basically it seems like when
you're born, you come equipped with this. Don't worry about
that sound. Actually you can be soothed by it. It's
not something that should stimulate your fight or flight response.
(19:37):
But we've lived around industrial machinery and the sound of
a text message or a leaf blower, the stupid leaf
blowers for such a little amount of our evolutionary history
that our minds are not at all attuned to those
things or um, we haven't kind of adopted this idea
that a leafblower is non threatening and so it stimulates
(19:59):
the fight flight response and is when we hear it.
That's right, So you're gonna hear that sound, you're amygdala,
which we've talked about plenty uh contributes to emotional processing,
is going to send that same distress signal to the hypothalamus. Again,
that gets if you are in a fight or flight response,
which is why you probably want to run screaming if
(20:20):
you here too many sirens, you're here too many leaf blowers,
and then that's gonna signal your adrenal glands to get
your adrenaline going. And I believe cortisol gets going as well.
It's like literally mimicking fight or flight. Yeah, And so
they figured out that like people who are continuously chronically
exposed to sound, like say people who live like really
(20:42):
close to an airport, really close to the subway tracks,
or um, people who work in a really noisy factory,
they have all sorts of crazy random health problems, like
their kids sometimes have low birth weight. Obviously, they can
develop tonitus um heart disease, obesity, diabetes, UH. There, their
(21:05):
children who are exposed to to chronic noise can have
UM cognitive impairments, um, high blood pressure, like all sorts
of crazy stuff. And so you think, well, okay, that's
that's like, that's terrible anybody who has to live near
noise or work near noise, like we should do something
about that. But it's even worse than that, Like, noise
pollution is even more insidious than that, because you don't
(21:27):
have to be chronically exposed to it. You don't have
to live in a place where you're like, this is
an objectively noisy place that I live or work in
to still suffer from the effects of noise pollution. Yeah,
I mean it can affect you when you're sleep because,
like you said, your ears are always on. It's not
like you go to sleep and the ears say, well,
I'm gonna take a nice break. That would be a
(21:49):
fantastic evolutionary addaptation. Actually, well, actually it would these days.
It wouldn't be the mountains, the mountain lions, saber tooth
tiger days. Yeah. Nice. If there was a switch and
you could kind of control that, it would be so nice.
I think the switches, the white noise wave machine is
that switch, Yeah, which I've gotten addicted to such that
(22:11):
I have to travel with him now. Yeah, everywhere I
go I've heard that. Yeah. Basically, once you start, you
can't go back. Yeah, I like it, though, I do.
Brown noise is my drug of choice. It sounds so
gross though brown. Yeah. I make a brown noise every morning,
you know what I mean? Wow, I was not expecting
danger Field to make an appearance. Well that's what you meant, right,
(22:34):
poop or no? Yeah, I mean I guess anytime I
hear brown, I think it's poop. You know, you think
of that or you think of ween the band, did
they have a brown song or album? They talk about
the brown thing, the brown sound, and brown is just
sort of their color and how they used to talk
about sound. And I've heard other groups talk about brown sounds.
So what does brown sound sound like? Well, brown noise,
(22:57):
you know if white noises, brown noises o middle. Yeah,
it's sort of a lower lower end. And if you
actually play it through a speaker, like if you put
it on your phone and play it through a little bluetooth,
you can get some good base and it just it
really works. Wonders for me. I should try brown noise
(23:17):
or even white noise. I've been using um chrome noise
where it's like, kid, do do do do do, And
it's really not helping me sleep at all. You're like,
you're like, I have the sound of a early Internet
connection being made a constant um. Did they ever name that?
(23:38):
They should have named that great? Yeah, I don't know.
I just call it whatever it was. They called it
the ticket wichet um. Interrupted sleep, though, that's that's the
big problem, or one of the big problems, because your
ears are always on. If you have uninterrupted sleep or
poor sleep overall, you're gonna be tired. Obviously, your creativity,
(24:00):
memory can get impaired. Your creativity is going to be low.
You're gonna have impaired judgment, your psychomotor skills might be impacted.
You might have more headaches. They've done studies. If you
live near airports and stuff like that, or uh, you know,
next to like a rail yard, you're gonna have more headaches.
You might take more sleeping pills as a result. Um,
(24:20):
you might be more prone to minor accidents, and you
are going to be more prone to seek uh psychiatric
treatment in your life. They like studies have shown this. Yeah,
there's a study of people living near European airports. They
found a tendestible increase in aircraft noise was associated with
a twenty eight percent increase in anxiety medication, and that
(24:42):
people um were also likelier to have more likely to
have symptoms of depression. So again all this is just
from like having not good sleep, which is bad enough,
but apparently Chuck it even gets worse because even if
your sleep isn't disturbed where you're waking up and not
getting sleep because of noise, like you get used to it,
(25:05):
the noise is still affecting you while you're sleeping because again,
your ear never turns off. It's always on the listen
out for some sort of threat creeping up on you.
And so if you're exposed to noise while you're sleeping,
it's still has that stress effect on you. And what
they've figured out is that one of the problems of
just being chronically stressed through something like noise and I
(25:28):
think stress in general, is that UM it affects I
think it's called the end athelium, which is the lining
of your blood vessels, and they respond to chemicals that
tell them to constrict to relax UM, and they get
constricted when they get stressed, when they're exposed to stress
like cortisol or something like that comes along and says constrict.
(25:50):
And when they do that, you get high blood pressure.
You can end up with heart disease, you can end
up suffering from heart attacks. And what's insane is they
figured out that after one night of being exposed while
you're sleeping to something like train sounds um your endothelium
it starts suffering, like it doesn't function as well after
(26:14):
just one night of that. Right, Like, isn't the idea
that you can have no other sort of poor health
markers and it can actually be brought on because of
this noise. Right, Yes, while you're sleeping, you're still getting sleep,
but it's still happening to you while you're sleeping. And
not only like high blood pressure um or um like
(26:34):
a heart attack or something like that coming down the road,
but also like diabetes, obesity. There's a lot of things
that we're figuring out are are tied to the lining
of the blood vessels and whether they're healthy or not.
It's a huge predictor of a whole range of diseases.
And when you hear noise, that's your stressors trigger your
(26:56):
endothelium to constrict, and that is a really bad thing.
It is um here in the United States. We kind
of started studying the stuff in earnest in the seventies.
That was when uh pollution was a big deal just
all around in the United States, and we started to
say things like, hey, maybe you shouldn't just um have
(27:16):
a family picnic and then just uh pick up your
blanket and dump all the trash on the ground like
they did on that episode of Madmen and on Anchorman
where they're all eating McDonald's And I saw a guy
throw a fully like McDonald's thing out the window day
the day and smashed on the sidewalk. Oh my god,
(27:37):
And I was just like, who who does that? Still, Yeah,
that's the problem is is we're at a place in
in our country's history where if you confront people like that,
there's a chance you're gonna get shot for confronting someone
like that. But I don't confront But that's like, that
isn't the kind of behavior you should under normal circumstances,
non shooting circumstances, feel perfectly fine confronting somebody about like
(28:00):
what what is wrong with you? Like we're so far
beyond that, Like everyone knows you shouldn't do that. It's
just insane. I got into a good fight with him
in my brain. Yes, I know, Like what, like, where's
the solution, where's the answer? I don't know, man. I
think the zen path is you go pick up that
McDonald's cup and throw it away and and say a
(28:22):
prayer for that person good luck. Uh So. Yeah. New
York uh is where they started studying this stuff in
the seventies because it was kind of wrapped up, like
I said, folded into larger pollution studies. They're like, well,
we might as well talk about noise pollution. New York
is a place to do it, and they did. There
were a couple of studies in the nineteen seventies about
(28:42):
subway noise that really sort of gave put the whole
thing on some terra firma as far as the health
effects and and and learning effects. In the case of
kids at PS ninety eight in Manhattan, it was very
close to the train tracks there, the subway train track close. Yeah,
like two twenty feet away. And they found and this
(29:05):
is this is pretty startling. They found that the kids
that were closest to the train tracks were eleven months
behind their classmates. That were on the other side of
the school. Yeah, on like not in another school, just
on the other side of the school. Yeah, almost a
full well, I mean that is basically a full school year,
(29:25):
because you know with summer's often stuff, that's an academic
year plus that they were behind. And they installed acoustic
tiles in the classroom and some dampening devices, and they
did a follow up study and the gap had closed basically,
So I mean there's proof right there, like your kids
are not learning as well if they're near that subway noise.
(29:46):
There's another kind of landmark study in the seventies in
New York that established the concept of noise pollution at
a place called the Bridges Apartment high rise or a
cluster of them in Manhattan that I believe I've maybe
drives under or really really close, um. And the traffic
(30:08):
noise is so bad that even as high up as
the eighth floor, the traffic sound is about the level
of a vacuum cleaner. And like just sitting in your
apartment you have to raise your voice to be heard, um,
which I mean, just the stress of that I can't imagine,
Like that's an inhabitable, uninhabitable place. I believe people are
(30:30):
still living there as well. UM. But the the this
this study found that children living there were far behind
it reading comprehension at listening comprehension uh, and just weren't
learning as as quickly as other kids their age who
did not live in the bridges. So those two studies
together from New York kind of established this idea like, Okay,
(30:53):
there's a there's a real problem with noise pollution UM.
And then it just went away for many, many years,
is until about two thousand eleven when the WHO. There's
a bunch of other studies, a lot of the other
ones that we've restaurant so far came out around two
thousand ten, two thousand eleven two. I'm not sure what
exactly kicked it off, but there was a big spade
of them. But then the WHO released a really big report,
(31:16):
not the WHO, the band, the World Health Organization. They're
another loud band actually, and UM, yeah, they felt terribly
guilty about causing hearing loss in their their fans, so
they launched the study of UM uh basically all of
Western Europe. UM. They looked at UM I think something
like five hundred different studies and did a meta analysis
(31:39):
of them to calculate what's called the disability adjusted life
years or dailies that were lost in Europe every year
two noise pollution. Yeah, And the idea of a daily
is they can't. They basically say, it's like the healthy
years of your life that are end up being lost
to this human made noise that you're living with. And
(32:04):
it's kind of a sort of an esoteric way to
think about it, but once you wrap your head around
it, it it makes a little bit more sense. But they
found that at least one million healthy years of life
are lost every single year only just in Europe due
to noise pollution. A million healthy years of people's lives annually. Yeah,
(32:25):
And that that means because of all of the disease
burden that noise pollution produces in humans, that that's how
much of our our healthy lifespan is shaved off every
year collectively, or how much Europe's is. And they did
a follow up study in two thousand and eighteen, Chuck,
and found that actually, no, we got it wrong. It's
one point eight million dailies are lost in Western Europe
(32:49):
alone each year. So they definitely established through these this
these couple of who studies like, no, noise pollution is
still a thing and we should probably do something about
on it. And there was another study that was released
this past year that said, yes, dailies are significant, but
we may have found a link that shows that noise
(33:09):
pollution can actually straight up kill you under some circumstances potentially. Yeah,
And this one was this is pretty startling because they
looked at herd Uh, well, not necessarily heart attack, but
nighttime deaths. No, I guess it was heart attacks. But
if you die overnight, die in your sleep quote unquote
from heart attacks. Uh, and the link to commercial aircraft
(33:34):
flying over your house, and I guess they had a
way to sort of cancel out all the other factors.
And they got down to the nitty gritty that three
of all nighttime deaths from heart attacks can be attributed
to the sound of aircraft flying overhead while you're sleeping.
That's just like that was it. That was the last
(33:54):
stress response that your body could handle, and you had
a heart attack and died from that sound. They said, like, Okay,
we found a definite correlation, but if there is causation here,
then we can chalk up about three percent of those
that's astounding. It is astounding. We're gonna take a break.
That's the human grossness, and we'll talk about the awful
(34:15):
things that we're doing to our animal friends in nature
right after this, all right, Uh, we talked about a
(34:45):
lot of studies that basically all added up to noise
pollution very bad for human beings, like literally bad for
their health. And and I know we've talked about a
few of these before over the years, especially when it
comes to whale. Uh, but all manner of mother nature
are impacted by this noise. They did a study in
(35:07):
the early two thousands about stress hormones um for what
kind of whales were they right whales? The right whales
in the Bay of Fundy, And they saw and this
was remarkable. They saw a really weird, unexplained declined in
the stress hormone concentrations that went away and then came
back up again. And they eventually realized it was a
(35:29):
halt in the shipping in the bay after eleven happened. Yeah,
because shipping is probably humans noisiest marine endeavor that we
do all the time constantly. And the idea of a
break and that having being connected to a huge decline
in stress hormones in whale poop. That's that's significant. But
(35:51):
it was an accidental discovery, and I think it led
other people to start studying stuff like that, like the
effects of noise on wildlife. And there was US I
think University of Idaho. I'm sorry. If it's Idaho State,
please don't be mad. I think it's okay. UM a
study from two thousand twelve where researchers set up like
what they call the Phantom Road, which is basically they
(36:14):
have fixed a line of loudspeakers to some trees out
in the wilderness that stretched about a half a mile
in length, and um, they just played road and traffic
noise and not like city stuff, just like the kind
of stuff that possibly a remote road through the wilderness
would sound like. Because they recorded it in Glacier National
(36:34):
Park on a road there, and just from that, just
from like this rural Glacier National Park road noise, something
like more than a quarter of all the birds in
the area just left. They were like, we're moving, We're
going to Canada. So everybody in the United States, Yeah,
you know, I think I definitely noticed, and I heard
(36:56):
other people talk about UM in like April of last
year when things really slowed down commuter and traffic wise
due to the pandemic. And I don't think it was
just um our our imaginations, but there were there was
a lot more bird activity going on. Uh. And I
remember I think I remember us even talking about it.
(37:19):
Um or maybe it was just quieter for us, so
we noticed the more or maybe a combination of both,
but there was there was a difference. And when you know,
when shipping stops after nine eleven or when um traffic stops,
nature says, oh uh, the the human a holes are gone.
Now we can start behaving normally again. Yeah, like things
(37:41):
are back to normal. Um. And that's I mean, that's
just on land. Also, they found that Idaho study found
that the birds that stuck around lost a bunch of
weight which they would have needed to migrate, so maybe
they couldn't leave even if they wanted to. But those
that was the land study. There's been other studies on land.
But it seems like the the we're doing a lot
of damage to marine ecosystems as well, like probably even
(38:04):
more because sound waves travel and water a lot better
than light, which means that most of the animals that
live in the water have really sensitive hearing. That's what
they've evolved to use to communicate and listen out for, right,
So when we make noise, it's really problematic and marine ecosystems, Yeah,
and we make a lot of noise. I mean that
shipping activity we talked about is super disruptive to anything underwater.
(38:30):
When they search for mineral deposits on the sea floor
or under the sea floor, they use these seismic air
guns that are you can hear those things like a
fish can hear that a thousand, thousands of miles away.
Very disruptive. Um, sonar and no We talked about sonar
in in an episode years ago and how that affected
marine life. I can't remember what it was. Did we
(38:52):
do an entire episode on the time they blew up
the beach to whale? Like what to do with the
beach whale? Maybe? I think, but they basically kind of
say now, like they think the reasons Wales beach themselves
is because of these noises and sonar as a big culprit, right, Um,
like it just drives him out of the water, which
sounds bonkers, But if you ever think about how humans
(39:13):
sometimes jump from tall buildings rather than being burned by
the intensity of a fire. I think it's virtually the
same principle. Sure, so we are we have become aware
of just how much noise pollution affects, not just us,
but the environment as well. Like it's it is a
form of pollution. Um. And it seems like you know,
(39:34):
it started to accumulate in the last few years, but
really we've known for a good fifty years that noise
pollution is really bad for everybody. Uh, and yet we've
done almost nothing about it. But we had the start, Chuck,
We started out like we were going to like almost
immediately when we realized how bad noise pollution was in
the seventies, we started to do something about it um
(39:58):
and the federal government passed like th and actually I
saw a fourth one um huge acts that had to
do with basically controlling noise pollution. Yeah, either controlling noise
pollution for people in general, or through OSHA, making sure
people were working in safe conditions or at least had
you know, the ear cans and things they needed to
work safely. And it was, like you said, it was
(40:19):
headed in the right direction. We knew it was bad
and we were trying to stop it. And then the
Reagan administration came along and said, nuts to that, that's
federal regulation. Let's just leave it to the states, because
you ask any governor of any state and they'll tell
you their citizens know to do the right thing, and
they'll do that right thing. And uh so we'll just
(40:40):
leave it up to the states and let them. Uh
they volunteered to face itself out. The Office of Noise
and Abatement Control, uh on paper still exists, but Congress said,
you know, let's just not fund them anymore and let's
keep these laws on the books, but really not worry
about it too much because the states will take care
of it, right, because states always do the right thing. Yeah,
And the states, of course, did absolutely nothing, and it's
(41:01):
partially because they can't do a lot about it. A
lot of noise is really best understood, studied, and regulated
by the federal government. Like what like Georgia has a
bunch of money reserve to study the effects of noise
on humans. Like, no, that's totally a federal kind of
thing to do, you know. And that's what some of
(41:21):
those seventies acts set up, like that, that Office of
Noise Abatement and Control or noise control in abatement, like
it's purpose was to study that kind of stuff. That's
not what states do. So the states have, well not
the states, but usually more municipalities and counties have. They
have taken steps to kind of mitigate sound pollution. Like
there's your noise pollution. There's usually regulations on how early
(41:45):
or late a landscaping crew can work within the city limits,
or some of them say like you can't boom your
stereo or you're not allowed to have that broken glass
muffler on your Harley. Um, like, there's some stuff like that.
But then like if you live kind of under a
flight path, if your town wanted to say, you know what,
you can't fly over our town and wake everybody up
(42:07):
between you know, twelve at night and seven in the morning,
you can't fly an airplane over it. The airplanes would
just be like like, I didn't hear you. Sorry, I
was listening to the Feds who say you can't make
laws like that. Yeah, And you know, I get the feeling.
With municipalities. It is more like complaints from neighbors kind
of noise or the lawn cruise in construction like you
(42:30):
were saying, and less like stuff with big teeth um recently,
Uh weird reason I won't get into, but I was
looking up noise ordinances and Athens, Georgia, and they're kind
of funny when you look at these noise ordinances. It's
like it literally said, like you know, walking down the
sidewalk um yelling at one another, talking about basically drunk kids,
(42:52):
you know, like the French quarter kind of thing. Uh.
It said, you know, this includes hooting and hollering, and
it was something about being able to hear you from
like three feet away, but or noise from your apartment.
But it's you know, it's like good luck with that.
Like you can call the cops on someone maybe, but
there's no teeth or or or what do you call
(43:15):
it when you or enforcement kind of with a lot
of this stuff, aside from singling out people when it
happens in the moment, and you may get a cop
come by and say turn it down. But even if
there's a will to do something, it depends on if
it's like rail traffic or air traffic, like the federal um,
the federal government ties local local towns and counties hands
(43:36):
like they can't do anything about it, and there's um
as a result, there's a lot of noise pollution that
people can't do anything about. There's a um. There's a
town in Canada. I can't remember the name of it,
but it is um. It's got really like a rail
system that goes through it, and it doesn't have like
alarms or like the arms that come down. So trains
(43:57):
have to hank their horns at least three times as
they crossed through this town. And there's a bunch of
different crossings, and they calculated that train horns blair twelve
hundred times a day in this little tiny town. And like,
obviously everybody's going nuts, but they can't do anything about
it because the federal government of Canada is in charge
(44:20):
of regulating rail travel like every other developed or industrialized country. Yeah,
and even if it's something like Osha and like you,
you work in allowed factory and they're trying to regulate that,
they say that a they don't cover all industries they
should cover, and when when they do, it's very inconsistently applied.
And even when they do apply it inconsistently. Um, they
(44:43):
say that these limits aren't even low enough to protect
all the workers anyway from hearing loss said, OSHA regulations
allow workers to be exposed to ninety five decibels for
four hours a day, five days a week, for your
entire forty year career, and that that that's like you're
going to suffer from hearing loss if that's the case. Yeah,
(45:04):
that's like holding a leafblower right right next to you
for four hours a day, five days a week for
forty years. Like of course you're going to lose you're hearing. Like,
that's that's crazy. Well, and then fact you're in the
other health effects that no one ever talks about that
we mentioned in the whole first half of this thing.
And you have an unhealthy population if you're stuck in
one of those places. So we can sit here and
(45:25):
corvetch all day, which we we would love to do.
But there are solutions to this, but we I want
to point out one more time, all these solutions are
zero thanks to the Reagan administration. Um. Instead, there's some
simple stuff you can do to help us humans, Like
you can change aircraft routes, you can build barriers along
roadways and railways. UM. You can even green it up,
(45:47):
like they found that if you use shrubbery and trees
mixed together so that they basically produce a fence, and
you plant them close to the road or close to
the railway rather than close to the place that you're
trying to protect. They do pretty good at reducing the
decibels of the sound the noise pollution coming from the traffic. Um,
(46:07):
that's some easy stuff you can do. And then on
the user end, on the individuals, and there's all sorts
of like acoustic insulation and paneling you can add to
your house to make it a little more soundproof and quieter. Um,
what about those mufflers chuck car mufflers. Yeah, so apparently
the ones that make the sound or not not they're
(46:28):
not good. Yeah, I mean that they could they could
change that. The e p A could get involved and say,
you know what, you can't have those kind of mufflers anymore.
Thank god if they did. As far as the shipping go,
and know, it's always like a Honda Civic or something
that it's like tricked out, like it's some kind of
race car um. As far as the water goes in
(46:49):
the shipping stuff like that. Those big ships, Uh, they
found that if they separate the ship's engine from the hull. Uh,
they are quieter, much quieter, and they even found that
there is uh. I think there's a se reduction in
acoustic energy um six to eight decibels, which is significant. Uh.
And they also found that it is less fuel efficient.
(47:12):
And if they like retrofitted or kind of change the
way they built these ships, I don't know if you can, well,
I guess you can retrofit something. Well, yeah, the propellers
are what's making them less fuel efficient, so you can
easy not easily, but you can take off the old
propellers and put on new ones. Right, But it costs
a lot of money up front, like they will save
in the long run. And I think uh is it
pronounced Marsk, the big shipping company. They spent a hundred
(47:34):
million bucks to do just eleven of its ships, So
that gives you the idea of how much it costs. Uh.
There may be seen some efficiencies if they did more
or something, but it's not cheap. And they have seven
forty ships they've done eleven, so well, I did see
that is actually a very small fraction of all of
the ships involved in shipping that are responsible for the
(47:56):
vast majority of the noise. So if you did just
focus on the worst offenders that would have a significant impact. Yeah,
there's also a huge amount of noise, apparently underwater noise
that comes from offshore wind farms because of the pile
driver that is moved by up and down by the
blades to help produce the electricity to move the turbine right,
(48:20):
And they found that if you just put a perforated
pipe around the pile driver, the pile driver is going
to produce bubbles and those bubbles will dissipate the noise.
Almost all the noise I think like of the noise
coming from those offshore wind farms. That's a really simple,
easy solution. Just do it people. Yeah, and there's one
other thing that I hadn't thought about, but I saw
(48:40):
a couple of places and it really makes sense, is
that the noise pollution we're contributing to marine ecosystems in
particular is just such low hanging fruit that there's no
reason we shouldn't do this. There's some really easy stuff
we can do, like even rerouting shipping lanes is one
thing we can do, and that by doing that it
will actually stabilize marine ecosystems in marine life so that
(49:05):
it will buy us a little time while we're figuring
out much trickier stuff like ocean acidification and things that
are also threats to it. So it's like, just removing
noise pollution would really go a long way toward extending
the UM. I guess the health and vitality of the
oceans while there, you know, while we're combating climate change.
(49:26):
I love it. Let's get all these things going. Our
health is suffering. Let's start with the mufflers. Yeah, that's
just annoyance. Uh. Well, since Chuck said that's just annoyance,
of course, everybody, that means it's time for listener mail. Uh.
This one's pretty short and sweet. I just love it
when we get an answer about something. I think I
(49:47):
might have known this at some point, but we talked
about shrinking as humans. And this is from uh Steve
and Roscoe, Illinois. He says, I've been a long time listener,
never had a reason to reach out, but you my
Arab expertise. I'm a physical therapist, and while listening to
episode about crash testing, you ask why do we shrink
when we get older? What happens is we age, guys,
(50:09):
is the intervertebral discs in our back lose hydration and
as a result, we shrink. Uh. There are six discs
in the cervical spine, twelve discs in the thoracic spine,
and five discs in the lumbar. If each disc were
to lose a minimum of one six of an inch
in height, that adds up pretty quickly, and you can
(50:29):
easily lose an inch plus in your lifetime. The other
thing to consider as we age is our muscles and
tissues get tighter, pulls us into positions of poor posture.
That's right, and this restricts our ability to stand up straight.
You can bind all these things together and all of
a sudden, Josh isn't going to hit his goal height
of six ft. I have to stay on my tippy toes.
(50:50):
New thanks for all the good work. I hope it
didn't step on the toes of a future short stuff.
I think we just did it. Steve. That's Steve Marima
or Marima from Rusco in a way. Thanks a lot, Steve,
that was a good email. We appreciate that big time.
And if you haven't stumbled upon it yet, you should
check out our episode Encarcopania. It is old, but it
(51:11):
was interesting. Yeah, if you have any ethysical therapy needs
in Illinois. Give Steve a cal sounds good guy, Yeah,
head to beautiful Roscoe, Illinois. Come on, if you want
to be like Steve from Roscoe and uh give us
some more info that we were asking for. We love
that kind of stuff. You can send it to his
(51:31):
via email to stuff Podcasts at iHeart radio dot com.
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