Claire and I are going over for a meeting with staff members of the nursing home where my Mom lives this morning and the primary issue on the agenda is noise. That's right -- noise.Now, I've talked before on the blog about how pleased we are at the care my Mom has received at this place and how attentive they've been to our concerns. We're up there a lot and we've become involved in the lives of many of the other residents besides my mother as well as several staff members too. And so they've paid careful attention to our requests even as they've enjoyed Claire's frequent offerings of cookies. (We're not above the occasional bribe.)
But recently Mom got a roommate. And that's really changed the atmosphere. It's not that the lady isn't quite nice. She is. And Mom really likes her. And we accept the financial necessity which places two people in one room.
But the TV noise is now very loud, very intrusive and constant. Something has to be done.
My Mom's television, which is on a small stand by the window, sits idle. She never watches it. But her roommate's TV, like most of them in the other rooms, is placed high on the wall where it is inescapable on both a visual and audio plane. And like I said, it's really loud.
All the time.
Mom is terribly afraid of offending anyone about anything and she assures us that the TV noise doesn't bother her at all. But I don't believe that's the case. For even when we think we're coping with noise, our bodies disagree.
George Prochnik, author of In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise, describes a few of the problems:
Noise wreaks havoc on all different parts of our bodies. The heart rate accelerates. We get vasoconstriction. It's been shown that the elevated blood pressure from nighttime noise continues all through the day. Even if we're not fully aroused by noise, sleep is fragmented. Loss of sleep is tied to all kinds of immune and heart problems, and a real laundry list of ailments. The really scary thing is even if we do habituate mentally to noise, that doesn't change what's happening to our bodies...
I saw a study this past week about our problems multitasking. It found that when, for example, you're reading a book and a fire truck goes by, the brain is so overwhelmed by the external stimuli that it can't link up with the goal-directed activity [reading the book]. You're incapable of doing it for a considerable time afterwards. So think of the way we're always being blinded by sonic and visual surprises, and the implications for deliberative thought are scary...
Is noise truly inescapable in our time? Is there no place where we can escape the intrusion of dissonant sound? Must our bodies and brains be forced to suffer the stress from clamoring, clattering commotion everywhere we go? Like even in one's nursing home room?
I'll let you know how things work out.
