By DIANE PHILLIPS

Every morning at about 7:35am, a car passes my home. Actually, a lot of cars and trucks and motorcycles pass my residence, not surprising because I live -- and have lived for the better part of 40 years -- on a main road. But this one car stands out. The noise from it is so deafening that any conversation inside the house is put on hold. Someone raises a finger in that familiar way, meaning stop, wait for the vehicle to pass. We shake our heads in disbelief as if we are hearing it for the first time and can’t believe anyone could be either dumb enough to play music that loud or deaf enough from doing it all these years to tolerate it. We hold our conversation and our breath. The vehicle passes. We shake our heads one last time as if we were shaking off the experience and interruption, and usually start with words like, “Now, where was I?”

That momentary drama is a fleeting interference, briefly annoying though not of major consequence. But it is symbolic of something far more dramatic. While our tolerance for people and ideas we don’t agree with seems to be shrinking, our tolerance for noise appears to know no bounds.

Weekend concerts, dogs barking incessantly, lawn mowers on Sunday, the chatter of too-loud cell phone conversations better intended for the bedroom or bath, the catcalling, whistling, shouting, screaming, even the decibel level of our conversation has inched higher as we try harder to get a point across.

The result - we live in an increasingly noisy world and like it or not, it’s killing us. The noise level of our current lives is taking a toll on our brain and our health.

How noisy is our world

Some parts of this scenario come as no surprise. Scientists, medical experts and researchers have long known that loud noise can damage hearing. As long ago as the 1700’s and 1800’s, hearing loss was well documented among the men who made their living as blacksmiths and endured the constant hammering of metal, chiselling ridges in hard steel, forging iron that caused a ringing in the ear even when they were not working. But the skill was in such demand and so lucrative they ignored the consequences. Today, occupational safety regulations would never permit that level of noise, though The Bahamas is sorely lacking in noise pollution legislation. In fact, there are few places in the Statutes where you can find any reference to noise allowance. Bahamas National Trust is one. In the ‘Conservation, Preservation and Protection of (National) Parks,’ loud noise is strictly taboo. Tragically, so is barbequing, but that’s another point.

Unfortunately, that respect for quiet does not cover parks like Goodman’s Bay, Montagu, Clifton Heritage, or others in Grand Bahama and the Family Islands that are outside the BNT management umbrella, though we might consider taking a page from some of their restrictions.

The problem is, Bahamian culture is noise-adept, even noise friendly. We are not alone. I was in the pharmacy just yesterday when a woman from an Asian country shouted across the store to a friend to tell her she found something they must have been looking for on a shelf. Her high-pitched decibel level could have brought down the House of Assembly during a heated pre-election round of debate. The piercing voice within inches of where I stood was so sudden and shocking that involuntary impulses overran my normal self-control – my eyes popped open wide, my mouth gaped and words poured out I hadn’t planned and never dreamed possible “Shhh,” I said with a ferocity of those offended on behalf of others, “We don’t scream across stores in this country.” To which she replied, “Sorry, how else was she supposed to hear me?”

You know when you’ve lost, right?

So I moved on, but it triggered this column and I confess, an itch for a quiet place. First, though, I wanted to know how much noise is too much noise and what does too much noise, whatever that is, really do to you?

Two parts to what we can handle

So when it comes to noise, there are two parts to what causes trouble and another two ways the trouble works. First, in layman’s terms, the parts it affects are first, tiny hair cells that pick up sound vibrations and second, the auditory nerve that carries signals from those hair cells into the brain. Damage one and you damage the ability to absorb or transfer. Damage both and you are in serious “can’t hear you, please repeat and yes, I promise to get hearing aids, soon,” territory.

In addition to the two parts that make up how we hear, there are another two parts to what we shoot at those tiny hair cells and the waiting delivery nerve canal – volume and pitch – and most importantly, the duration, the time we bombard our ears with more than they were built to handle comfortably. Some sounds that seem almost innocuous like normal street traffic can have no affect on our hearing if we hear it for short bursts of time. But listen to it eight hours straight, and it’s a different story altogether. Our comfortable decibel range (dB) is 65 or less. Normal conversation is about 60 dB. Anything at 85 dB or higher, especially for prolonged periods, can take those little hair cells to war so you can only image what exposure to heavy metal or techno at a rock concert will do.

Then, again, there’s the Bahamian cultural aspect of getting your point across by simply being louder than the next guy. Sports events are a perfect example. Cannons or gun fired to signal start of fireworks for a celebration. Or talk about native sloop racing, something that doesn’t even involve an engine. Get 12 men each on two sloops about to collide and every man suddenly standing, grabbing fists full of air and shouting, bellowing, screaming  ‘Starboard’ at decibels that could reach the heavens even if they are on port as if the louder they scream the more rights they will have and the dB level could put a jack hammer to shame.

The sound of the siren

One of the most common sounds in New Providence, though far less frequent in the Family Islands, is the sound of the siren. Every weekday, the Department of Corrections bus screams through the streets, sirens blasting and blaring at 110-120 dB, though why they race confuses me since its passengers are presumably handcuffed, which you would think would somewhat hinder the idea of escape. Nevertheless, we the public in its way, concede to its need for speed and sound, veering our own vehicles off to a safe haven on a sidewalk, holding our breath as it passes, hoping the screaming van now nearly on two wheels ready for take-off or turn over can squeeze past and the little one in the car seat in the rear won’t be slammed into the wall outside their window.

Apart from simply not liking all the noise around us in our, as we said in the beginning, our increasingly noisy world, what is the impact?

It turns out there is a lot more at risk than hearing loss. Excessive noise leads to hypertension, depression, stress. It can even impact how we sleep and the louder the sound the faster it damages hearing. A growing body of research is providing more insight, including how sound interacts with the brain.

According to Dr Laurie Heller, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, the same decibel level can trigger entirely opposite effects depending on whether we like the sound or not. Some sounds, she says, like a bubbling brook can elicit a positive, peaceful response while the rumble of an air conditioner at the same decibel level can be interpreted as annoying. “There’s a lot that goes on in the brain when processing a sound,” says Heller. “You’re deciding whether or not you like the sound, whether to pay attention to or ignore the sound, what to do with that information.”

Well, Dr. Heller, there are a few sounds in The Bahamas that are pretty hard to ignore, including that man who passes my house at 7:35 every morning and the prison bus that races between Fox Hill and the courts. But you know what, gaining even a tiny bit of insight into how we hear and how we interpret explains why words like tranquil and serene trump expressions like techno to the core. Or maybe why every time I look at the vacuum cleaner and think, I really need to run it over the one area rug we have, I close the wooden broom closet door and think, Tomorrow will be just fine.