 Email
 Print |
Quiet, please!
Noise pollution can damage your health and shatter your peace of mind. Here’s how to turn it down.
Babisch adds that these reactions occur even in people who consider themselves inured to noise and don’t report disturbed sleep. “There is no 100 percent noise habituation. The ears don’t switch off when we sleep. The brain still registers the information about what’s going on around us.”
Neurosis, hysteria, anxiety, stress, nausea, aggression, argumentativeness and social conflict—these are just a few of the emotional problems linked to uncontrolled noise. And while noise may not cause mental illness, it’s believed to worsen disorders like depression and anxiety. According to a 2004 study published in the British Medical Journal, people living near the Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, were more likely to need sleep medication, take pills for heart disease and report poor general health.
Noise may not make kids dumb, but it does make it hard for them to learn. The Road Traffic and Aircraft Noise Exposure and Children’s Cognition and Health (RANCH) project is a multinational study designed to assess the relationships among road and aircraft traffic noise and reading comprehension. Included in its 2006 findings are data from more than 2,000 kids ages 9 and 10, enrolled in 89 schools near airports in three European cities. The verdict: A direct relationship exists between aircraft noise exposure at schools and problems with reading comprehension, even after the investigators account for socio-demographic factors known to interact with reading comprehension.
“Most of the long-term effects of chronic noise are detrimental to attention, learning and concentration,” says Lorraine Maxwell, associate professor of design and environmental analysis at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “These are psychological and learning effects,” according to Maxwell, not hearing problems.
She and her colleagues have also studied the effects on learning of road and air traffic, and the difficulties caused by noise in daycare centres and schools. “We know that very young kids in daycare learn to screen noise so they can stay on task,” she says. “But they can get too good at this. By the time some of them are in elementary school, they’ve learned how not to pay attention to the classroom instruction.”
Maxwell adds that noise is highly detrimental to kids when they’re trying to focus on a task that happens to be difficult for them, like a math skill, for example. Noise is also a disaster for children with learning disabilities or for whom the classroom language isn’t their native tongue.
“It takes too much energy to pay attention in a noisy environment,” explains Maxwell. “As adults, we can usually call ourselves back to attention when it’s important, but children who learn this pattern at a very young age don’t do that.”
The March 5, 1907, edition of The New York Times ran a story about a meeting of The Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise, an organization dedicated to “an aggressive campaign against the useless and nerve-racking noises of the street.” The Society reported progress in getting automobile owners to avoid driving past churches, hospitals and schools. If drivers couldn’t avoid these institutions, they were asked to do two things: reduce their speed and refrain from using the horn. At about the same time in Boston, Massachusetts, hurdy-gurdy players were required to tune their instruments at least once a year.
The gentlepeople of The Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise would be disheartened by the situation today. But to the NPC’s Les Bloomberg, things are looking up. “One reason for my optimism about noise pollution is that it’s hard to imagine it getting worse,” he says. “For 50 years, people with means have moved to suburbs to escape noise. But that option doesn’t work anymore. Now we take the noise with us to the suburbs, and suburban noise levels have increased.”
Bloomberg cites the usual suspects, some of the stuff that made Peter D’Epiro’s life miserable: leaf blowers, lawn mowers, nearby highways, air-conditioning units and booming car stereo systems.
The German Federal Environmental Agency’s Babisch thinks new technologies can help turn down the volume. “Technological advances have caused some noise sources to quiet down,” he says. “Cars and aircraft are less noisy than they once were, and countless noise barriers have been erected. But this is compensated for by the increased volume of traffic, so overall noise exposure hasn’t changed much.”
Babisch believes additional technological advances will be necessary to keep us from getting stuck in the present moment, noise-wise. Acoustical engineers are finding ways to reduce noise in hospitals, prisons and schools. Solutions range from the simple—carpeting—to the novel—antibacterial fibreglass, which absorbs the noise created by ventilation systems, hospital equipment and human speech. Road surfaces are constantly refined to reduce the amount of noise that bounces off nearby homes.
Worried that a snoring spouse may shorten your lifespan? Consider popping in some earplugs at night. There’s no evidence yet that you’ll live longer, but at least you’ll sleep better.
<< PREVIOUS
1
2
3
4
NEXT >>
view as a single page
| Tools:
Discuss
| Email
| Print
| RSS
| Weekly Newsletter Save/Share: |
As a teacher, thank you for speaking up about students, learning and noise. Some people think I run a tight ship because my classroom is quiet when they enter, but my students talk when they want, but quietly and appropriately. They understand the need for less noise and in fact as the year progresses they choose having a calm and quiet environment. Most of my students are disadvantaged, live in crowded conditions, this is probably the only quiet they have during their day. Who ever said quiet was a bad thing?
posted by blaber on 7/14/2008 12:10 pm