This morning we awoke to dead calm conditions. Not a breath of air moving around, flat calm water, perfect visibility. JollyDogs is wandering very gently around perhaps due to tidal currents. For a while there was a bommie just off the stern, plenty deep enough for keel clearance, and teaming with colorful reef fish. It’s nice to enjoy morning coffee while watching colorful little fishies tooling around, just going about their day.
If we remain still there’s almost no sound and we can hear our own breathing, hear the blood rushing through our ears. In a former life I did a lot of acoustic development on prototype cars; this is like being in an anechoic chamber. My first experience in the one at North Carolina State University back during grad school was an absolutely bizarre experience, a total lack of anything but self-generated sound.
There’s a lot of research into the impact of noise on human stress responses. Noise is most typically thought of as undesired sound, but in reality it includes inaudible vibration, light stimulation from computer screens, and these days access to an overabundance of real-time information and mis-information, whether it’s Siri or OK Google or Alexa, the mind numbing 24/7 news cycle on radio and TV, or internet cranks. Mental, emotional and physical health problems are almost certainly partly caused by all the noise most of us experience in a routine day. Certainly in the US this must account to some extent for the increasing rate of murder, suicide and even perhaps mass shootings.
Sleep hygienists now recognize that looking a computer screen near the beginning of a natural sleep cycle disturbs our ability to fall asleep or enjoy a good night’s rest. Most computers and devices now include a nighttime setting that allows the user to reduce the amount of blue light waves emanating from the screen. It’s obvious that stimulation such as an action movie will get one’s mind busy and preclude getting to sleep just afterwards.
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