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Hi friends, it's Josh, and for this week's Select, I've chosen our October 2021 episode on noise pollution, which is actually an overlooked hazard to our health and it's even been shown to cause death in some cases.
Plus, it guest stars the worst thing in the world, the gas-powered leaf blower.
And we get to the bottom of why they're so terrible.
Plus, there's plenty more amazing action-packed stuff.
So kick back and enjoy this episode on noise pollution.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W, Chuck Bryant and there's Jerry over there, and this is Stuff You Should Know.
Can I tell people what just happened?
Sure.
After, what, going on 14 years?
Coming up, yeah, I guess in April.
Jerry hit record, and you went, hey, everybody.
You went, oh, wait.
I've been having a lot of trouble with my brain lately.
I think I'm just... Hey, I think you're doing great.
I don't know if I told you.
Thank you.
I think you're doing great too.
I don't know if I told you, but I had trouble remembering how to what six plus seven added together too.
Did I tell you that the other day?
That sounds familiar.
That really bothered me, man.
Yeah.
And that's like my favorite number, and it's like I just couldn't do it.
I was putting my daughter to bed the other night and as she was going to sleep, literally falling asleep Mm-hmm.
Daddy, what's 4 plus 4?
That's 8.
What's 6 plus 2?
That's also 8.
Okay.
She's learning math and you know that first stuff you learn is literally just that simple addition.
Yeah.
And it's just funny to think about, like, wow, that's what's on her mind right now.
Yeah.
But also she's learning acceptance too, just unquestioning.
Can I tell people how you spelled –
This document that you sent my way for this noise pollution episode.
Sure.
Boy, you're just playing it all out there, aren't you?
It was fun because it looked like a heavy metal band.
It was N-O-I-Z-E-P-O-L-L-U-S-H-U-N.
And looking at it on paper, I was like, oh, man, that's a good, bad band name.
Yeah, it is.
Like, that's a good name for a made-up band in a movie.
Like Wild Stallions.
Yes.
Bill and Ted.
Yeah, although that's tough to compete with, you know?
It is.
I also think we should give a little COA here.
I think it's 100 impossible for you and I not to turn into old men again complaining about like loud music and loud mufflers and stuff in this episode.
So it's gonna happen.
I think everybody who knows us and saw the title of this one knew it was gonna happen.
But let's just put it on the table now.
I introduced that concept to my daughter the other day and said you know, she was like well, what's that?
And I said, well, it's as bad as trash on the road, but it's noise that's doing it.
And you should be aware of it.
And she was like, oh, okay.
Yeah.
And I guess it never occurred to me that, like loud noises for kids unless it's something that really bothers them is just part of life.
Sure.
It definitely seems to become more bothersome the older you get.
Absolutely.
I think.
I don't know why, but I'm going to hypothesize that it's because you grow to learn that it doesn't have to be that way.
And you come to really resent the things and the people who are making it so.
Yeah.
And I think that's why people – one reason people retire to the country or something like that if they've lived in the city their whole life.
Just a little more tranquil place. perhaps even bucolic lifestyle, quieter.
And there's a lot of science behind it.
It's not just like, oh, I don't want to hear those noises.
As you will see throughout this episode, it's bad for your health.
Hey, speaking of retirement, have you seen that documentary on the villages?
I have.
It is bonkers.
Yeah, I saw it.
Actually, when I had COVID, I went on a documentary binge, and that was one of them.
Man, it was like one of the most disturbing documentaries I've ever seen and I've seen like Dear Zachary and somehow it was like up there with it.
It was good, man.
I mean, I don't want to give you anything but the one guy that was.
You know the sort of disco stew.
Sure, yeah.
That was, it's kind of funny at first, but then that got really sad too.
Yes.
A lot of layers.
All of it was incredibly sad.
Highly recommended.
Yeah, just bizarre, man.
And then I was watching the credits and I saw Darren Aronofsky was an executive producer.
I'm like, okay, here we go.
Nothing suddenly clicked a little more.
I thought a great idea for a movie would be a setting like that.
You couldn't call it that because it's, I'm sure, proprietary, but- The towns.
Yeah, a setting just like that where-
They wake up one day and there's been a murder.
And then like, you know, Kyle McLaughlin, it's kind of a Twin Peaks-y thing.
You know, the stranger from a strange land comes in to investigate a murder in a very unlikely place.
And all the sort of weirdos there.
I think that would be a cool movie.
Yeah.
Or TV show.
Sure.
Well, I mean, that is Twin Peaks, basically.
Right, but if you said it in a retirement community in Florida, people wouldn't recognize that.
You could just walk away dusting your hands off like, job well done.
There's plenty of things that have done that.
It's not just Twin Peaks.
Sure, I know.
Just nobody did it better than Twin Peaks, I think.
Agreed.
All right, so noise pollution.
I think the fact of the podcast to me came right up front, in that I never thought of the fact that a decibel was a tenth of a bull or a bell.
And it's got deci right there.
Yeah, I know.
I never thought of it either because you never hear of any other variation.
It's like one decibel, 10 decibels, 100 decibels, you know.
And apparently a bull or a bell, B-E-L— is named after Alexander Graham Bell, too.
Didn't know that either.
And the reason why a decibel is used which is one-tenth of a bell is because a decibel, a one-tenth of a bell, difference in sound is the lowest, the smallest difference that humans can detect.
Right.
So we trade in decibels here on the human level.
And we trade in an algorithm when we talk decibels, because it's one of those weird things where it's not like 100 decibels isn't twice as loud as 50 decibels.
It's spit into an equation that's actually 100,000 times as loud.
Yeah, so like 10 decibels, the difference between 10 decibels and 20 decibels is 10 times louder.
The difference between 10 decibels and 30 decibels, 30 decibels is 100 times louder.
It's logarithmic.
And zero dBs, as we'll call them, that is the threshold of human hearing, period.
And 140 decibels is about where you can start to experience literal physical pain from a sound.
Yeah, I saw between 120 and 140.
Yeah, it ranges.
I mean, I've been to some loud concerts in small venues.
Yeah, Dinosaur Jr. at Variety Theater was it for me.
I was just about to say Dinosaur Jr.
They're one of the legendary loud bands.
It was insane.
It is super loud, but it's not, like, I don't remember feeling pain, but I do remember feeling discomfort at a couple of these where I was like, geez, this is, like, I like my music loud, but this is a little much.
Dude, yeah, like, I don't wear earplugs.
I wore earplugs in that, and I was like, I'm saving myself right now.
It was so loud.
And I meant to say Variety Playhouse, not Variety Theater.
Yeah, because we played there before.
We don't want to disrespect you.
No, I know.
You know, there are a variety of things.
But all of this to say, God bless Jay Maskis.
Yeah.
No, it was great, but it was really loud.
What about this conversation that we're having?
What is that?
Well, it depends.
A normal conversation is something around 60 decibels and I saw that that's people standing about a meter apart speaking without raising their voices.
That's 60 decibels right there for reference.
Right.
What about a car?
Cars are about 10 times louder to 1000 times louder than normal conversation, depending on the car or the truck, between 70 and 90 decibels.
What about an airplane or a siren?
So you would think, okay, a normal conversation is 60 decibels.
An airplane being 120 decibels is twice as loud.
No, my friend.
It's...
It's 100,000 times louder.
An airplane is 100,000 times louder than a normal conversation if it reaches 120 decibels.
All right.
If you've ever been on a tarmac like a live tarmac and heard a plane kind of landing or taking off.
That's some loud stuff.
Yes.
And that's why they wear those cans on their ears.
Yeah, and they definitely should, because we're starting to realize that there's all sorts of hearing loss besides the traditional ones that you can pick up on a regular hearing test.
There's something called hidden hearing loss that we're just starting to get our eyes or mind around where the structure of your hearing apparatus in your ear, the little cilia that's almost like a Venus flytrap trigger hair, but for sound instead like those things can be intact.
But the neurons that form the chain between your ear and your brain can be permanently damaged, so that the sound that gets to your brain is garbled or partially missing.
Mm-hmm.
And that's a huge thing, and that can happen at much lower intensity than we understood before.
And speaking of intensity, I think we should say real quick, a decibel.
To us humans, we basically talk in decibels as like a measure of volume, because that's what it appears to like us like.
An increase in decibels is an increase in the volume of the sound.
But really, what a decibel is measuring?
Is the intensity of the disturbance of the air that something has made?
So if you're really close to that disturbance, it's going to be a very intense exposure to your ear.
If you're further away, it's going to be a much less intense exposure because it kind of dissipates over distances.
But to you it's just registering as a difference in volume, where really it's a difference in the intensity of the wave that's being produced, that's traveling through the air.
That's right.
And this is all sound.
Yes.
That's not noise.
Noise is different.
Noise is what we're talking about mainly.
And noise is classified as unwanted sound.
Simple enough.
Yeah, that can vary depending on who you are, obviously.
Right.
You know, the sound of your significant other's voice after 40 years may be noise to you.
Asking for some tea.
The sound of a Harley Davidson motorcycle being revved up in front of your house might be noise.
Or those blowers that you used to hate and now that you love and use.
I still don't love it.
And I went battery powered, but it's still.
Even while I'm using it, I'm like I'm a terrible person.
But you get it done quickly probably, right?
So quick.
So quick.
I'm like mincing and prancing, just getting it done.
And there's a lot of kinds of different noise.
Sometimes, like, let's say you work in a machine shop or something.
And you use a machine, like, the sound the machine makes is like...
It's not necessary, but it's a byproduct.
It's a result of the machine working correctly.
It's not like, well, let's just make this thing loud.
It's like, well, I'm sorry.
A jackhammer is going to be loud because that's just the way it goes.
You can reference our jackhammer episode.
It was fantastic.
Yeah, it was so good.
So that sound isn't necessarily noise, but the intensity and repetition of that sound makes it becomes noise.
Yeah yeah, it's an unwanted intensity, or it can just the sound existing itself, like you're saying, like a leaf blower, just an unwanted existence of sound.
So either way, the the operative thing is it's unwanted sound.
That's the key, right?
Yeah, and this is another cool fact of the episode, I think, is that they think that as late as through the 1940s and into 1950, natural sounds were still the dominant sounds that you heard.
And then things really changed.
Yeah, because there's a big qualifier that a lot of researchers make that and not everybody does.
But that noise is, by definition, human caused.
Right.
Like either we're yelling or whatever, or one of the machines that we've created is making noise.
But that you wouldn't say like the sound of that waterfall is noise.
Like we don't think of like natural sounds typically as noise.
It's just sounds.
Right.
And, as we'll see, it's probably because we have been living like our species has been living around those sounds and has definitively excluded them as threatening so that they don't produce like an irritation in us.
They just are sound almost regardless of how intense they are.
Right.
And again that irritation is subjective because that rock concert that I enjoy, someone else might call that noise.
That space shuttle launch that is super loud might be noise to some people, but to others, you know, it's the same sound but they don't think of it as noise because they're excited and exhilarated in the moment to see and hear that thing.
Yeah, so, you know, the other night the Inspiration4 crew came back on the Dragon Capsule.
Did you watch that?
No.
Did you see it live?
We didn't see it because they splashed down in the Atlantic, but we heard the sonic boom it made when it came back into the atmosphere over Florida.
It was astounding.
That's awesome.
Did you see that doc?
What a sonic boom.
No, I didn't.
Oh, it's really good.
It starts out like, oh, God, this is not good.
This is like a terrible corporate ad.
And then it really starts to find its feet.
It's crazy how it evolves over like just the first couple episodes.
I got to see it.
It's good.
It's definitely worth seeing.
What other kinds of noise?
You've got industrial noise, which that's classified as kind of from the beginning of the process all the way to the end of any kind of industrial process.
And that's basically called continuous noise from, you know, raw materials all the way to the end.
Disposal of whatever byproducts can usually cause a lot of racket.
Yeah so, like you know, like a generator humming or something like that, there's not a lot of variation in intensity.
It's basically this hum or steam being released, or even like a rhythmic, like something being like hammered.
No, not hammer.
That's a different, that's called the impulsive noise.
But just something that doesn't really vary.
It's just kind of a monotonous sound.
That's kind of a subcategory called continuous sound.
And it just so happens that most industrial processes are continuous in nature.
Right, whereas a train going by your house or a plane flying or a car going by or a siren is intermittent.
Yeah, and then also you could probably say, like if you held the trigger down on a backpack leaf blower, which again, is the worst thing that anyone's ever invented.
But if you held it down, that would be a continuous sound for the whole time it was going.
But no one does that ever.
They just rev in this arrhythmic pattern that your brain is just giving its all to try to find a pattern in.
Yeah.
And so you get worn out and irritated so quickly because of those things, because they don't follow rhyme or reason.
Yeah.
In conjunction with that, it's an intermittent sound which is, from what I can tell, one of the worst sounds for us.
Right, and then you've also got community noise, which is just people noise.
I think the leaf blowers are thrown into that, lawnmowers.
You know if you've got a festival in your neighborhood or fireworks on the Fourth of July or people playing their music in their cars or their houses.
This is all just sort of people-generated community sound.
Yeah, so those are basically the three categories that I saw, industrial, traffic, and community.
Should we take a break?
I think we should.
All right.
We'll be right back.
I've got to go quiet down that racket outside, and I'll be right back.
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Living with a rare autoimmune condition comes with challenges but also incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis or MG and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.
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Okay, did you finish shaking your fist at those teenagers on your lawn?
I'm lucky because we don't have one neighbor on one side and our neighbor beside us is pretty quiet.
But I do live near, and I've talked about it before, a pretty main road.
And you kind of get used to it, but I also yearn to be a few blocks in.
But you can't pick up your house and move it, so what are you going to do?
You get used to it.
You can, but it's really expensive.
Well, no, that is true.
You can move a house sometimes.
Didn't we do an episode on that once?
How to Move a House?
Yeah.
I don't know if we did one just on that.
It may have been like Historic Districts or something.
I don't know.
Okay.
And by the way, that episode we couldn't think of the other day was Crumple Zones.
Oh, boy.
So we did do a whole episode on Crumple Zones?
We did.
Boy, we were scraping the bottom of the barrel there.
But I remember that being an interesting episode, though, wasn't it?
Oh, it was totally interesting, yeah.
Well, it's the stuff you should know away, isn't it, Chuck?
It is indeed.
Should we talk about hearing damage?
Yeah.
So, like I was saying, there's that kind of new type of hearing damage that we're wrapping our minds around.
That is like the death of the neurons that are supposed to transmit the electrical impulse to the brain.
And so we don't hear very well.
Our communication is garbled, and yet you can pass a traditional hearing test, no problem.
Yeah.
But other research is really starting to unfold like less predictable ways that noise and noise pollution actually affects our health.
And it's like our entire system is negatively affected by noise and noise exposure.
It is.
And it basically, at the beginning of the whole process, is triggering the same exact thing that triggers your fight or flight response.
Like you're going to have the same reaction to, you know, if you hear a siren go by, the same thing is happening in your as far as your brain knows, then what happens if like. a bear walks up to you and roars right yeah so like our our hearing is always on and it's always on the lookout for um a potential threat and one of the ways that a potential threat can give itself away is by making a sound right it was like i was saying earlier like we've been around waterfalls and the sound of waves in our evolutionary history for so long That basically it seems like when you're born, you come equipped with this, don't worry about that sound.
Actually, you can be soothed by it.
It's not something that should stimulate your fight or flight response.
But we've lived around industrial machinery and the sound of a text message or a leaf blower the stupid leaf blowers for such a little amount of our evolutionary history that our minds are not at all attuned to those things, or we haven't kind of adopted this idea that a leaf blower is non-threatening.
And so it stimulates the fight or flight response in us when we hear it.
That's right.
So you're going to hear that sound.
Your amygdala, which we've talked about plenty contributes to emotional processing is going to send that same distress signal to the hypothalamus again.
That gets if you are in a fight or flight response, which is why you probably want to run screaming if you're hear too many sirens or hear too many leaf blowers.
Sure.
And then that's going to signal your adrenal glands to get your adrenaline going.
And I believe cortisol gets going as well.
Yes.
And it's like literally mimicking fight or flight.
Yeah.
And so they figured out that, like people who are continuously, chronically exposed to sound like say, people who live like really close to an airport or really close to the subway tracks, or people who work in a really noisy factory, they have all sorts of crazy random health problems, like their kids die, sometimes have low birth weight.
Obviously, they can develop tinnitus, heart disease, obesity, diabetes.
Children who are exposed to chronic noise can have cognitive impairments, high blood pressure, like all sorts of crazy stuff.
And so you think, well, okay, that's terrible.
Anybody who has to live near noise or work near noise, like we should do something about that.
But it's even worse than that.
Like noise, pollution is even more insidious than that because you don't have to be chronically exposed to it.
You don't have to live in a place where you're like this is an objectively noisy place that I live or work in to still suffer from the effects of noise pollution.
Yeah, I mean, it can affect you when you're asleep because, like you said, your ears are always on.
It's not like you go to sleep and the ears say, well, I'm going to take a nice break.
That would be a fantastic evolutionary adaptation, actually.
Yeah.
Well, actually, it would be terrible.
It would these days.
These days it would be great.
The mountain lion, saber-toothed tiger days.
Yeah, it'd be nice if there was a switch and you could kind of control that.
Oh, it'd be so nice.
I think the switch is the white noise wave machine is that switch.
Yeah, which I've gotten addicted to such that I have to travel with them now everywhere I go.
I've heard that.
Yeah, basically once you start, you can't go back.
Yeah, I like it though.
I do brown noise as my drug of choice.
It sounds so gross though.
Brown noise.
Hey, I make a brown noise every morning, you know what I mean?
Wow, I was not expecting Dangerfield to make an appearance.
Well, that's what you meant, right?
Poop or no?
Yeah, I mean, I guess.
Anytime I hear brown, I think it's poop, you know?
You think of that or you think of Ween, the band?
Do they have a brown song or album?
They talk about the brown thing, the brown sound, and brown is just sort of their color and how they used to talk about sound.
And I've heard other groups talk about brown sounds.
So what does brown sound sound like?
Well, brown noise, you know, if white noise is... Brown noise is... Okay.
That's the best way I can describe it.
It's kind of middle...
Yeah, it's sort of a lower end.
And if you actually play it through a speaker, like if you put it on your phone and play it through a little Bluetooth, you can get some good bass and it really works wonders for me.
I should try brown noise or even white noise.
I've been using chrome noise where it's like... And it's really not helping me sleep at all.
You're like, I have the sound of a...
Early internet connection being made on a loop.
On a constant loop.
Did they ever name that?
They should have named that.
It would be great to just call it whatever it was.
They called it the tickety widget.
Interrupted sleep, though.
That's the big problem or one of the big problems because your ears are always on.
If you have uninterrupted sleep or poor sleep overall, you're going to be tired, obviously.
Your creativity, your memory can get impaired.
Your creativity is going to be low.
You're going to have impaired judgment.
Your psychomotor skills might be impacted.
You might have more headaches.
They've done studies.
If you live near airports and stuff like that or, you know, next to like a rail yard, you're going to have more headaches.
You might take more sleeping pills as a result.
You might be more prone to minor accidents.
And you are going to be more prone to seek psychiatric treatment in your life.
Like studies have shown this.
Yeah, there's a study of people living near European airports.
They found a 10 decibel increase in aircraft noise was associated with a 28 increase in anxiety medication, and that people were also likelier to have like 25 more likely to have symptoms of depression.
So again, all this is just from like having not good sleep, which is bad enough, but But apparently Chuck, it even gets worse.
Right.
Like you get used to it sort of.
The noise is still affecting you while you're sleeping.
Because again, your ear never turns off.
It's always on the listen out for some sort of threat creeping up on you.
And so if you're exposed to noise while you're sleeping, it still has that stress effect on you.
And what they figured out is that one of the problems of just being chronically stressed through something like noise and, I think, stress in general is that it affects I think it's called the endothelium, which is the lining of your blood vessels.
And they respond to chemicals that tell them to constrict, to relax.
And they get constricted.
When they get stressed, when they're exposed to stress like cortisol or something like that, comes along and says constrict.
And when they do that, you get high blood pressure.
You can end up with heart disease.
You can end up suffering from heart attacks.
And what's insane is they figured out that after one night of being exposed, while you're sleeping, to something like train sounds, your endothelium starts suffering.
Like it doesn't function as well after just one night of that.
Right, like isn't the idea that you can – have no other sort of poor health markers, and it can actually be brought on because of this noise, right?
Yes.
While you're sleeping.
You're still getting sleep, but it's still happening to you while you're sleeping.
And not only like high blood pressure or like a heart attack or something like that coming down the road, but also like diabetes, obesity.
There's a lot of things that we're figuring out are tied to the lining of the blood vessels and, whether they're healthy or not, it's a huge predictor of a whole range of diseases.
And when you hear noise, that's your stressors trigger your endothelium to constrict, and that is a really bad thing.
It is um, here in the united states, we kind of started studying this stuff in earnest in the 70s.
Uh, that was when uh, Pollution was a big deal just all around in the United States.
And we started to say things like hey, maybe you shouldn't just have a family picnic and then just pick up your blanket and dump all the trash on the ground like they did on that episode of Mad Men.
And on Anchorman, where they're all eating McDonald's and they just throw it on the ground in the park.
Yeah.
I saw a guy throw a fully like McDonald's thing out the window the other day and smashed on the sidewalk.
Oh, my God.
And I was just like, who does that still?
Yeah, the problem is we're at a place in our country's history where –
If you confront people like that, there's a chance you're going to get shot for confronting someone like that.
I don't confront.
But that's like.
That is the kind of behavior you should, under normal circumstances, non-shooting circumstances feel perfectly fine confronting somebody about and being like what is wrong with you.
Like, we're so far beyond that.
Like, everyone knows you shouldn't do that.
It's just, oh, it drives me insane.
Oh, I got into a good fight with him in my brain.
Yes, I know.
Like what?
Like, where's the solution?
Where's the answer?
I don't know, man.
I think the Zen path is you go pick up that McDonald's cup and throw it away.
Totally.
And say a prayer for that person.
Good luck.
So yeah, New York is where they started studying this stuff in the 70s, because it was kind of wrapped up, like I said, folded into larger pollution studies.
They were like, well, we might as well talk about noise pollution.
New York is the place to do it.
And they did – there were a couple of studies in the 1970s about subway noise that really sort of gave put the whole thing on some terra firma.
In the case of kids at PS98 in Manhattan.
It was very close to the train tracks there, the subway train tracks.
Like real close.
Yeah, like 220 feet away.
And they found and this is pretty startling, they found that the kids that were closest to the train tracks were 11 months older behind their classmates that were on the other side of the school.
Yeah, like not in another school, just on the other side of the school.
Yeah, almost a full...
Well, I mean, that is basically a full school year.
Yeah.
Because, you know, with summer's off and stuff, that's an academic year plus.
Yeah.
They were behind and they installed acoustic tiles in the classroom and some dampening devices.
And they did a follow-up study and the gap had closed basically.
So, I mean, there's proof right there.
Like your kids are not learning as well.
If they're near that subway noise.
There's another kind of landmark study in the 70s in New York that established the concept of noise pollution at a place called the Bridges apartment high rise or a cluster of them in Manhattan that I believe 95 maybe drives under.
Or really, really close.
And the traffic noise is so bad that even as high up as the eighth floor the traffic sound is about the level of a vacuum cleaner.
And, like just sitting in your apartment, you have to raise your voice to be heard, which I mean.
Just the stress of that I can't imagine.
Like that's an inhabitable, uninhabitable place.
I believe people are still living there as well.
But the study found that children living there were – far behind at reading comprehension, at listening comprehension and just weren't learning as quickly as other kids their age who did not live in the bridges.
So those two studies together from New York kind of established this idea like okay, there's a real problem with noise pollution.
And then it just went away for many, many years until about 2011 when, When the WHO, there was a bunch of other studies.
A lot of the other ones that we've referenced so far came out around 2010, 2011, 2013.
I'm not sure what exactly kicked it off, but there was a big spate of them.
But then the WHO released a really big report.
Not the WHO, the band, the World Health Organization.
They're another loud band, actually.
And, yeah, they felt terribly guilty about causing hearing loss in their fans.
So they launched this study of basically all of Western Europe.
They looked at, I think, something like 500 different studies and did a meta-analysis of them to calculate what's called the disability-adjusted life years, or dailies, that were lost in Europe every year to noise pollution.
Wow.
Yeah, and the idea of a daily is, they basically say, it's like the healthy years of your life that end up being lost to this human-made noise that you're living with.
Right.
And it's kind of a sort of an esoteric way to think about it.
But once you wrap your head around it, it makes a little bit more sense.
Yeah.
But they found that at least one million healthy years – of life are lost every single year only just in Europe due to noise pollution.
A million healthy years of people's lives annually.
Yeah.
And that means, because of all of the disease burden that noise pollution produces in humans, that that's how much of our healthy lifespan is shaved off every year collectively, or how much Europe's is.
And they did a follow-up study in 2018, Chuck, and found that – actually, no, we got it wrong.
It's 1.8 million dailies are lost in Western Europe alone each year.
So they definitely established through these couple of WHO studies –
Like, no, noise pollution is still a thing and we should probably do something about it.
And there was another study that was released this past year that said yes, dailies are significant, but we may have found a link that shows that noise pollution can actually straight up kill you under some circumstances potentially.
Yeah, and this one was – this is pretty startling because they looked at heart – well, not necessarily heart attack, but nighttime deaths.
No, I guess it was heart attacks.
Yes.
But if you die overnight, die in your sleep, quote-unquote from heart attacks and the link to commercial aircraft flying over your house.
And I guess they had a way to sort of cancel out all the other factors.
Mm-hmm.
And they got down to the nitty gritty that 3 of all nighttime deaths from heart attacks can be attributed to the sound of aircraft flying overhead while you're sleeping.
Yep.
That is just like, that was it.
That was the last stress response that your body could handle and you had a heart attack and died from that sound.
They said like, okay, we found a definite correlation.
But if there is causation here, then we can chalk up about 3% of those.
That's astounding.
Yeah.
It is astounding.
We're going to take a break.
That's the human grossness.
And we'll talk about the awful things that we're doing to our animal friends and nature right after this.
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All right.
We talked about a lot of studies that basically all added up to noise pollution very bad for human beings, like literally bad for their health.
And I know we've talked about a few of these before over the years, especially when it comes to whales.
But all manner of Mother Nature are impacted by this noise.
They did a study in the early 2000s about stress hormones. for what kind of whales were they?
Right whales.
Yeah, right whales in the Bay of Fundy.
And they saw and this is remarkable, they saw a really weird unexplained decline in the stress hormone concentrations.
That went away and then came back up again.
And they eventually realized it was a halt in the shipping in the bay after 9-11 happened.
Yeah, because shipping is probably humans' noisiest marine endeavor, that we do all the time constantly.
And the idea of a break in that being connected to a huge decline in stress hormones and whale poop.
That's significant, but it was an accidental discovery.
And I think it led other people to start studying stuff like that, like the effects of noise on wildlife.
And there was this, I think, University of Idaho.
I'm sorry if it's Idaho State.
Please don't be mad.
I think it's Idaho.
Okay, a study from 2012 where researchers set up like what they call the Phantom Road, which is basically, they affixed a line of loudspeakers to some trees out in the wilderness that stretched about a half a mile in length.
And they just played road and traffic noise and not like city stuff, just like the kind of stuff that possibly a remote road through the wilderness would sound like, because they recorded it in Glacier National Park on a road there.
And just from that, just from like this rural glacier National Park Road noise something like more than a quarter of all the birds in the area just left.
They were like, we're moving.
Yeah.
We're going to Canada.
That's what everybody in the United States says.
Yeah, you know, I think I definitely noticed, and I heard other people talk about in like April – of last year, when things really slowed down commuter and traffic-wise due to the pandemic.
And I don't think it was just our imaginations, but there was a lot more bird activity going on.
And I think I remember us even talking about it.
Or maybe it was just quieter for us, so we noticed them more, or maybe a combination of both.
But there was a difference.
And when shipping stops after 9-11 or when traffic stops, nature says oh, the human a-holes are gone.
Now we can start behaving normally again.
Yeah.
Like things are back to normal.
And that's, I mean, that's just on land.
Also they found that Idaho study found that the birds that stuck around lost a bunch of weight, which they would have needed to migrate.
So maybe they couldn't leave even if they wanted to.
But that was a land study.
There's been other studies on land, but it seems like the we're doing a lot of damage to marine ecosystems as well, like probably even more, because sound waves travel in water a lot better than light, which means that most of the animals that live in the water have really sensitive hearing.
That's what they've evolved to use to communicate and listen out for, right?
So when we make noise, it's really problematic in marine ecosystems.
Yeah, and we make a lot of noise.
I mean, that shipping activity we talked about, is super disruptive to anything underwater.
When they search for mineral deposits on the sea floor or under the sea floor, they use these seismic air guns that are.
You can hear those things like a fish can hear that thousands of miles away.
Very disruptive.
Sonar, I know we talked about sonar In an episode years ago and how that affected marine life.
I can't remember what it was.
Did we do an entire episode on the time they blew up the beached whale?
Like what to do with a beached whale?
Maybe.
I think we did.
But they basically kind of say now, like they think the reasons whales beach themselves is because of these noises and sonar is a big culprit.
Right.
Like it just drives them out of the water, which sounds bonkers.
But if you ever think about how humans sometimes jump from tall buildings rather than being burned by the intensity of a fire, I think it's virtually the same principle.
Sure.
So we have become aware of just how much noise pollution affects not just us but the environment as well.
Like, it is a form of pollution.
And it seems like, you know, it's started to accumulate in the last few years.
But really, we've known...
For a good 50 years, that noise pollution is really bad for everybody.
And yet we've done almost nothing about it.
But we had the start, Chuck.
We started out like we were going to like almost immediately when we realized how bad noise pollution was in the 70s.
We started to do something about it.
And the federal government passed like three and actually I saw a fourth one huge acts that had to do with basically controlling noise pollution.
Yeah, either controlling noise pollution for people in general or, through OSHA, making sure people were working in safe conditions, or at least had you know, the ear cans and things they needed to work safely.
And it was, like you said, it was headed in the right direction.
We knew it was bad and we were trying to stop it.
And then the Reagan administration came along and said, nuts to that.
That's federal regulation.
Let's just leave it to the states, because you ask any governor of any state and they'll tell you their citizens know to do the right thing and they'll do that right thing.
And so we'll just leave it up to the states and let them.
They volunteered to phase itself out.
The Office of Noise and Abatement Control on paper still exists.
But Congress said, you know, let's just not fund them anymore.
And let's keep these laws on the books, but really not worry about it too much, because the states will take care of it.
Right.
Because states always do the right thing.
Yeah, and the states, of course, did absolutely nothing.
And it's partially because they can't do a lot about it.
A lot of noise is really best understood, studied, and regulated by the federal government.
Like, Georgia has a bunch of money reserved to study the effects of noise on humans.
Like, no, that's totally a federal kind of thing to do, you know?
And that's what some of those 70s acts set up, like that Office of Noise Abatement and Control program or noise control and abatement.
Its purpose was to study that kind of stuff.
That's not what states do.
So the states have well, not the states, but usually more municipalities and counties.
They have taken steps to kind of mitigate sound pollution or noise pollution.
There's usually regulations on how early or late a landscaping crew can work within the city limits.
Or some of them say like you can't boom your stereo or you're not allowed to have that broken glass muffler on your Harley.
Like there's some stuff like that.
But then, like if you live kind of under a flight path, if your town wanted to say you know what?
You can't fly over our town and wake everybody up between you know –.
12 at night and seven in the morning, you can't fly an airplane over it.
The airplanes would just be like, like, I didn't hear you.
Sorry.
I was listening to the feds who say you can't make laws like that.
Yeah.
And you know I get the feeling with municipalities it is more like uh, complaints from neighbors, kind of noise, or the lawn crews and construction, like you were saying, unless like stuff with big teeth.
Um recently uh, weird reason i won't get into, but i was looking up noise ordinances in athens georgia, and they're kind of funny.
When you look at these noise ordinances, it's like it literally said like you know, walking down the sidewalk um, yelling at one another, talking about basically drunk kids, sure you know, like the french quarter kind of thing.
Uh, it said, you know, this includes hooting and hollering and it was something about being able to hear you from like 300 feet away um, But or noise from your apartment.
But, you know, it's like good luck with that.
Like you can call the cops on someone maybe.
But there's no teeth or or, or what do you call it when you or enforcement kind of with a lot of this stuff, aside from singling out people when it happens in the moment?
And you may get a cop come by and say, turn it down.
But even if there's a will to do something, it depends on if it's like rail traffic or air traffic.
Like, the federal government ties local towns and counties' hands.
Like, they can't do anything about it.
And as a result, there's a lot of noise pollution that people can't do anything about.
There's a.
There's a town in Canada I can't remember the name of it, but it's got like a rail system that goes through it and it doesn't have like alarms or like the arms that come down.
So trains have to honk their horns at least three times as they cross through this town.
And there's a bunch of different crossings.
And they calculated that train horns blare 1,200 times a day in this little tiny town.
And like obviously everybody's going nuts but they can't do anything about it because the federal government of Canada is in charge of regulating rail travel like every other developed or industrialized country.
Yeah, and even if it's something like OSHA and like you work in a loud factory and they're trying to regulate that, they say that A They don't cover all industries they should cover.
And when they do, it's very inconsistently applied.
And even when they do apply it inconsistently, they say that these limits aren't even low enough to protect all the workers anyway from hearing loss.
It said, OSHA regulations allow workers to be exposed to 95 decibels for four hours a day, five days a week, for your entire 40-year career.
That's insane.
And that's like you're going to suffer from hearing loss if that's the case.
Yeah, that's like holding a leaf blower right next to you for four hours a day, five days a week for 40 years.
Like, of course you're going to lose your hearing.
Like, that's crazy.
Well, and then factor in the other health effects that no one ever talks about, that we mentioned in the whole first half of this thing.
And you have an unhealthy population if you're stuck in one of those places.
So we can sit here and kvetch all day, which we would love to do.
But there are solutions to this.
But I want to point out one more time all these solutions are zero, thanks to the Reagan administration.
Instead, there's some simple stuff you can do to help us humans, like you can change aircraft routes, you can build barriers along roadways and railways.
You can even green it up.
They do pretty good at reducing the decibels of the sound, the noise pollution coming from the traffic.
That's some easy stuff you can do.
And then on the user end, on the individual's end, there's all sorts of like acoustic insulation and paneling you can add to your house to make it a little more soundproof and quieter.
What about those mufflers, Chuck?
Yeah.
Car mufflers?
Yeah.
So apparently the ones that make the sound are not good.
Yeah.
I mean, they could change that.
The EPA could get involved and say, you know what, you can't have those kind of mufflers anymore.
Mm-hmm.
Thank God if they did.
As far as the shipping goes, I know it's always like a Honda Civic or something that's like tricked out, like it's some kind of race car.
As far as the water goes and the shipping stuff like that, those big ships.
They found that if they separate the ship's engine from the hull they are quieter, much quieter.
And they even found that there is, I think there's a 75% reduction in acoustic energy six to eight decibels which is significant and they also found that it is less fuel efficient and if they like retrofitted or kind of changed the way they built these ships I don't know if you can well I guess you can retrofit some well yeah the propellers are what's making them less fuel efficient so you can not easily but you can take off the old propellers and put on new ones Right, but it costs a lot of money up front.
Like, they will save in the long run.
And I think, is it pronounced Maersk, the big shipping company?
Yeah.
They spent $100 million to do just 11 of its ships.
So that gives you the idea of how much it costs.
There may be some efficiencies if they did more or something, but it's not cheap.
And they have 740 ships.
They've done 11, so...
Well, I did see that it's actually a very small fraction of all the ships involved in shipping that are responsible for the vast majority of the noise.
So if you did just focus on the worst offenders, it would have a significant impact.
Yeah.
There's also a huge amount of noise apparently underwater noise that comes from offshore wind farms because of the pile driver that is moved up and down by the blades to help produce the electricity to move the turbine right.
That's right.
And they found that if you just put a perforated pipe around the pile driver, the pile driver is going to produce bubbles and those bubbles will dissipate the noise, almost all the noise.
I think like 95% of the noise coming from those offshore wind farms.
It's a really simple, easy solution.
Just do it, people.
Yeah, and there's one other thing that I hadn't thought about but I saw a couple places and it really makes sense is that the noise pollution we're contributing to marine ecosystems in particular, is just such low-hanging fruit that there's no reason we shouldn't do this.
There's some really easy stuff we can do.
Even rerouting shipping lanes is one thing we can do.
And that by doing that, it will actually stabilize marine ecosystems and marine life better, so that it'll buy us a little time while we're figuring out much trickier stuff like ocean acidification and things that are also threats to it.
So it's like just removing noise pollution would really go a long way toward extending the, I guess, the health and vitality of the oceans while we're combating climate change.
I love it.
Let's get all these things going.
Our health is suffering.
Let's start with the mufflers.
Yeah, that's just annoyance and health.
Well, since Chuck said that's just annoyance, of course everybody, that means it's time for Listener Mail.
This one's pretty short and sweet.
I just love it when we get an answer about something.
I think I might have known this at some point, but we talked about shrinking as humans.
Mm-hmm.
And this is from Steve in Roscoe, Illinois.
He says, I've been a longtime listener.
Never had a reason to reach out, but you hit my area of expertise.
I'm a physical therapist and while listening to the episode about crash testing, you ask why do we shrink when we get older?
What happens as we age guys, is the intervertebral discs in our back lose hydration and, as a result, we shrink.
There are six discs in the cervical spine, 12 discs inside in the thoracic spine and five discs in the lumbar.
If each disc were to lose a minimum of 1 16th of an inch in height.
That adds up pretty quickly and you can easily lose an inch plus in your lifetime.
Wow.
The other thing to consider as we age is our muscles and tissues get tighter, pulls us into positions of poor posture.
Sarcopenia.
That's right.
And this restricts our ability to stand up straight.
You combine all these things together and all of a sudden, Josh isn't going to hit his goal.
Height of six feet.
I have to stand on my tippy toes now.
Thanks for all the good work.
I hope I didn't step on the toes of a future short stuff.
I think we just did it, Steve.
That's Steve Marima from Roscoe, Illinois.
Thanks a lot, Steve.
That was a good email.
We appreciate that big time.
And if you haven't stumbled upon it yet, you should check out our episode on sarcopenia.
It is old, but it was interesting.
Yeah.
If you have any physical therapy needs in Illinois, give Steve a call.
Sounds like a good guy.
Yeah.
Head to beautiful Roscoe, Illinois.
Come on.
If you want to be like Steve from Roscoe and give us some more info that we were asking for.
We love that kind of stuff.
You can send it to us via email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
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