Testing if 60 minutes of silence drives you crazy

There's a nice Veritasium video of an anechoic chamber here, with different people's reactions to it: [this video] I've been in sensory deprivation tanks, but never in an anechoic chamber (yet). However, I'm sure I'd love it. Many people live their life fleeing themselves, fleeing the thoughts in their head, and fleeing the realities they don't want to face. However, if you're emotionally healthy and are purposeful in establishing your identity and life direction, silence is simply golden. Not just auditory, but visual, social, and conceptual. Because of this, I don't think that there can be any singular preferable amount of noise for everybody. If there's some average, plenty of people will still find it distracting and grating, while others would find it too quiet and uncomfortable. Plus, I doubt it stays consistent even for a given individual. When you're stressed, you might want more quiet... or more distraction, depending on your preferences and reactions.

Sure, but absolutes are rarely used in their literal meaning. "Silence" doesn't refer to the absence of any noise, it refers to a very low level of noise. The absence of any noise at all is very difficult to achieve (although you can come close: [this video] ). The same goes for other absolutes like "black" (e.g. [link] is arguably "blacker" than other "black" materials). You're technically correct (the best kind of correct), but your point is moot. Very few words that describe absolutes can be used "correctly" in practice. The logical conclusion is that these words (despite their dictionary definition) don't refer to actual absolutes but rather extremes: silence is not the absence of noise, it's just the presence of a significantly smaller amount of noise. Heck, even words like "pregnant" aren't absolute in practice. With "pregnant" the implication commonly is "will give birth" (which is why we have euphemisms like "expecting"), so someone who is nearly due can be said to be "more pregnant" simply because they are closer to giving birth (and therefore also have a higher chance of delivering successfully) whereas someone within their first months of pregnancy may often not even want to disclose their state because so many things can still go wrong. In practice "silent" or "black" is no more absolute than "cold" -- and it would be silly to expect people to refer to zero kelvin when they say "cold", don't you think? Disclosure: I spent way too much time around linguists as a student