A fan running, the hum of tires on the highway, just about anything else that doesn’t vary in pitch, volume, etc. will put me right to sleep. When our daughter was born, the hospital suggested playing a radio, tuned (or “untuned”) between stations to a little static as a method to quiet her. Now the question: What is it about “white noise” that is so relaxing?
Perhaps the fact that it drowns out a lot of other random noises. It is much easier to become used to a constant noise than random noises.
The answer is nothing is so relaxing about white noise.
Actually it’s an old hat trick devised by engineering types to use white noise to mask-out unwanted background distractions. Actually though it increases your blood pressure and causes slight anxiety. It is not the optimal solution.
“What’s right is only half of what’s wrong and
I want a short-haired girl who sometimes wears it twice as long.”
George Harrison - Old Brown Shoe
Sorry, Dragonfly, but those noises definitely relax me. Of course, I suppose I could be falling asleep with elevated blood pressure and in an anxious state, but I kind of doubt it.
Personally, “white noise” has a relaxing value to it.
It is constant, and drowns out misc. noises that disturb a constant state of thought.
Particularly when resting, “white noise” becomes hypnotic or focused. I actually sleep better when there is “white noise” in my room.
There was a snowplow working outside my office today around 10 am… and if it wasnt for the BEEP BEEP BEEP when they backed up, I would have been totally asleep.
I was yawning my head off till they were finished.
yawning just thinking about it…gotta go
I’ve never understood why “white noise” was supposed to be so soothing. When my kids were babies, the doctor recommended that I use white noise (radio static, etc.) to get them to sleep, but it always drove me up a wall, and I had to turn it off before I ever found out if it worked.
I like natural repetitive noises, like rain, ocean, etc, that vary in pitch and rythym, but droning noises like fans just set my teeth on edge.
When I was shooting a movie in 1995, we did three weeks of nights at the end The people nice enought to let me stay at their house were, of course, trying to be quiet, but they were also living their life. After a few rough “days” sleep, I borrowed a box fan, and CRANKED it up, pointed away from me. It droned out everything, except my alarm clock, which was so high-pitched that it rose over the humming. I slept fine after that…
Cartooniverse
If you want to kiss the sky, you’d better learn how to kneel.
I not only have to have a fan going all year round, I’ve gotten my two sons to be the same way! DJ, my oldest, when he went away to college said the hardest thing to get used to was having no fan, so he uses his music set low. You should see the looks we get every time we visit a hotel carting in our own fan! It does distract them from the VCR we have to take too! 
“Honestly now, Chaplain, you wouldn’t want your sister to marry an enlisted man, would you?”
“My sister IS an enlisted man, sir” the chaplain replied.
Dragonfly, what IS the optimal solution?
I can’t stay asleep for more than about a half hour without white noise. In general, no matter how tired I am, I need a fan to get to sleep and to stay asleep. Without it, I can usually count on being awake a few extra hours, hearing EVERYTHING within about a two block radius.
Bucky
searching…
“What’s right is only half of what’s wrong and
I want a short-haired girl who sometimes wears it twice as long.”
George Harrison - Old Brown Shoe
Bucky,
there is an insomnia drug called Sonata that you may want to check out (comming out next month or so). It is used primarily for truck drivers and other occupations that need the little sleep that they get to be worthwhile. What the drug does is put you into rem sleep very quickly so 4 hours of sleep does not leave you groggy or tired. I would imagine that once you were put into this mode of sleep you would not wake. Something you may want to check out.
Openfist
Romeo, the hate I bear thee can afford
No better term than this,–thou art a villain.
Openfist,
That Sonata stuff sounded too good to be true, but when I looked it up, it sure looks legit.
http://www.pslgroup.com/dg/120fc2.htm
I’m still wary, but it sounds like quite an amazine drug. I guess we’ll see what happens when a non-particularly-self-restrained public gets ahold of it.
Your Quadell
the world is full of noise–it doesn’t strike me as odd that a little bit helps us go to sleep. The level of silence in a modern house or apartment is sort of unnatural–all that isolation and insulation. I think it kind of freaks the brain out to have no sensory input at all–afterall, our ancestors fell asleep to the sound of crickets, wind, rain, streams, blah, blah… I know that I, for one, sleep better with the window open, so that some of that natural noise comes in.
White noise is an abundance of sound waves sounding at a range of frequencies (corresponding to our perception of pitch) all approximately equal in amplitude(corresponding to our perception of loudness). So what the heck does that have to do with its relaxing effects you ask?
Well, allow me to speculate.
But first off, a word on how the ear works. If memory serves (and its been awhile) we hear pitch via vibrating hairs in our ear. There is a series of hairs (which either stimulate nerves or the hairs ARE the nerves themselves, I’m not sure) in your ear each corresponding to a small range of frequencies. (for ex, this so and so hair might vibrate every time it picks up a sound of 1000 Htz. give or take 10 Htz.). Now it also vibrates to a certain intensity in response to the particular intensity of the sound. (I.e. your little ear hair wiggles a little bit for a soft sound and a lot for a loud sound). If one of these hairs is picking up a sound at 1000 Htz and the sound’s intensity/loudness is a 4 on an arbitrary scale of 0 to 10 (though sound is typically measured in decibels which I will ignore for the sake of simplicity), then you will NOT be able to hear another sound at the same frequency of a loudness of 3 or less, it will have to be louder than 4 (note: if you are a member of Spinal Tap you have the option of setting your scale to go to 11). This I have experienced through experimentation.
OK, so what is white noise? Well white noise (like white light) occurs when many, many frequencies are present in a sound. Say, for example, there is a sound composed of all the frequencies from 400 Htz. to 1500 Htz. and all at the same volume. Well, now you have a whole lot of your ear hairs wiggling and wiggling at the same intensity. Let’s say that the intensity is a 3 on our scale of loudness. Now the threshold of loudness for which you could perceive a sound occuring within that range of frequencies is >3. In other words, another sound in that range of frequencies would need to be at least a 3 in loudness for you to hear it while, when in silence you would pick up any sound only slightly above 0. This drowns out a lot of sound. But then you ask, what about all that stimulation from the white noise itself? Well, I have a couple of answers for this.
(1) You habituate (or adapt, I’m not sure which is the correct term) to it. You nerve cells become fatigued and stop firing so much. They “get used to it”. They don’t feel it is necessary to keep pestering your brain with the same information. Or perhaps your brain just stops caring. It has received the info already and doesn’t need to keep knowing it. That’s why they make those car alarms which change their siren every few seconds so it really annoys you.
(2) Think of one of those massage chairs at the Sharper Image stores. If someone just kept poking you in the same spot on your back over and over again (thus stimulating a very small amount of nerve cells as would an alarm clock that beeps) it would be pretty annoying. But sit in one of those massage chairs which stimulate large numbers of nerves and with equal intensity and over a large space (whole back, legs, arms, etc.) and you are in heaven.
I have a tape of ocean sounds and pleasant and mellow new age synthesizer tones which got me through college. I used to have it playing in my room constantly 24/7 (which probably put a lot of wear and tear on the tape deck, now I have a CD). When my many housemates would be blasting music or being loud and I had to study, I would turn up the volume on my tape player (blasting it if necessary) and drown out everything. It really works.
“I feel just as reduced being called a system as I do a clock; life’s just not condensible…healing the world is an inside job.” - Thomas Harryman, Mindwalk.