Silence in The Age Of Noise is a charming book on the importance and luxury of silence in our fast-paced and hectic world drawing on philosophy, art and the author’s own experience as an Arctic Explorer in the South Pole.
Silence In The Age of Noise Summary
Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge once spent fifty days walking in total silence across Antarctica with a broken radio and is now a lecturer on the subject of silence.
Best known as the first man to reach the north pole, south pole and the top of Mount Everest, the book offers quiet contemplation on the nature of silence and its power to make us reflect and reconsider what is most important in our lives.
Below are some of the key insights from the book.
Key Insights
- The world’s secrets are hidden in the nature of silence.
- Most people cannot sit silently – we are preprogrammed to search for distraction
- Our average attention span is just 8 seconds and becoming lower.
- Silence is personal. Professional footballers report hearing a few seconds of silence when they score a goal in a packed stadium.
- Our minds are naturally chaotic rather than structured.
- Seneca suggests that life is long if you actually know how to use it but most of us don’t stop to take a moment of silence into our daily routine.
- Silence is a luxury. Most of us have to travel or seek out paid experiences to bring silence into our lifestyle.
- Silence is also 100% free – there are actually no logical marketing opportunities for something that is constantly accessible to all of us.
- Zen Buddhism embraces the practice of koan which involves sitting silently and challenging what you experience in life.
- Silence in music generates intense neural activity as the brain scrambles to anticipate the next beat dropping into your experience.
- John Cage 4’33’ remains one of the best loved works of art in classical music.
- Edward Munch The Scream is so powerful because your mind scrambles to find the acoustic expression that matches the visual stimuli.
- Psychologist Arthur Aron has proved that you can make two people with typical commonalities fall in love with just 36 questions asked in an experimental setting followed by a period of four minutes of silence.