Rowan Mangan:
Hi, Cahoot. Today we are talking about noisy. Some people pronounce it “noise.” I personally am more cultured, so I pronounce it “noisé.”

Martha Beck:
Noisé.

Rowan Mangan:
We live in a noisé culture, as many of you know.

Martha Beck:
And we think we can get used to it, that the noisés of our society, which are so different from anything in our ecological history, we think that they’re not bothering us. But studies show that our nervous systems are suffering a lot, even when we don’t realize it.

Rowan Mangan:
And birdsong might just be the thing that breaks the whole thing open and changes our lives forever. Listen in. We hope you enjoy it.

Martha Beck:
Yeah!

Hi, I’m Martha Beck.

Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan. And this is another episode of Bewildered, the podcast for people like you and me trying to figure it all out. Am I right?

Martha Beck:
Oh my goodness. It’s so hard to figure it all out.

Rowan Mangan:
I know, I know. What are you figuring out?

Martha Beck:
All right. You asked me first. I’ve been having a lot of trouble with cars.

Rowan Mangan:
With cars?

Martha Beck:
Driving, but not while the car is actually in motion. It’s when I’m in the driver’s seat and the car’s not moving. I’ve had a lot of incidents lately.

Rowan Mangan:
Gosh.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Especially because I had cataract surgery and I come out of there kind of blurry in the eyeballs.

Rowan Mangan:
Wow.

Martha Beck:
I can’t believe they let you drive after this thing. I’m running into the doorframe.

Rowan Mangan:
I can’t believe you let you drive.

Martha Beck:
Well, I fumbled around at a lot of locked doors for a while in that parking lot, but then later I did it at the grocery store too, just like going to the wrong car and fumbling around at it. It was not my car.

Rowan Mangan:
Marty, seriously, you should not be driving. I didn’t know about this.

Martha Beck:
It’s all, I mean, my eyes are clear as eagles now, of the eagle eyes. Eagles are not clear. They’re not clear visually and honestly, they’re not clear psychologically. I think eagles have issues. It all came to a head the other day when I came out of the eye doctor, opened my car door, got into the car, and realized there was already another driver in the car.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God. You sat on someone’s lap?

Martha Beck:
I did. I sat on her leg, to be specific, and her husband was in the passenger seat. And they were both, I don’t understand this, but they did not see this as the friendly overture it was.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God.

Martha Beck:
They took offense. And fortunately I was far too blind to see their expressions of disgust and hatred because that would’ve really done me in emotionally, but I couldn’t really see anything. I could just feel a warm and mushy leg under my own warm, mushy leg.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh God.

Martha Beck:
And I leapt out. I said, “Woo!” Like that.

Rowan Mangan:
Honestly, this is not just whatever was going on with your eyes, which by the way, we have to talk about a bit more later because you’ve been downplaying that. But that’s an ADD thing as well.

Martha Beck:
Oh, totally.

Rowan Mangan:
Because even if you were legally blind, the shape of another human in a place you’re about to deposit your own body—

Martha Beck:
You’d think one would check that. You’d think that an ordinary thinking person would just give a gander at the seat that you’re about to climb into to make sure there’s not, oh, I don’t know, another person in it.

Rowan Mangan:
What sort of person was it?

Martha Beck:
How do I know? I went, “Woo!” and got out of there and ran away. I saw, I saw a husband. I saw the foreboding shape of a husband in the driver passenger seat. I assume it was a husband. It was bald. That’s one thing I know.

Rowan Mangan:
And how was her thigh?

Martha Beck:
Mushy and warm like my own.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s nice.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, it was sweet. But she made a similar sound, “Woah!”

Rowan Mangan:
I’m not surprised. In fairness, you’re saying, you were both of you equally wronged, but you—

Martha Beck:
No, I think I was definitely the aggressor in this relationship.

Rowan Mangan:
No kidding.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And I don’t know how to, it’s over, but what I’m trying to figure out is how to sleep at night after that.

Rowan Mangan:
Right.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. What are you trying to figure out?

Rowan Mangan:
How to sleep at night after hearing that story from you.

Martha Beck:
Hm.

Rowan Mangan:
No, I was thinking actually about something that you and I struggle with. So here’s— to sort of set the scene for the listener, Marty is fairly well-known, and I would say celebrity-adjacent.

Martha Beck:
Among those who have heard of me.

Rowan Mangan:
In some contexts.

Martha Beck:
Reasonably well-known.

Rowan Mangan:
She’s sort of celebrity-adjacent. And I’m Marty-adjacent, and so I’m celebrity-adjacent-adjacent. And most of the time it is just us in our house, in our pajamas, as you all well know. But not long ago, we went to a thing and it was all about her, but I was there to carry the handbag, and there was a famous person there.

Martha Beck:
Oh God.

Rowan Mangan:
And I really, I won’t say who it is, but it’s a wonderful actor that I love very much.

Martha Beck:
A famous—a genuine celebrity.

Rowan Mangan:
Genuine celebrity.

Martha Beck:
In my defense, before you go any further, he had a hat.

Rowan Mangan:
He also had a mustache, which isn’t usually his style, but he was rocking it, of course. So I saw him and my brain went “ding!” and my face went, “Oh, it’s you, it’s you.” I was like, “I love your dog.” Because I follow him on Instagram, and he’s got a nice dog that he loves, and I thought that’s a nice way to break the ice here in this very artificial scenario. So I just said, “I like your dog,” as you often do when you meet someone for the first time. Marty took it in a different direction.

Martha Beck:
I didn’t recognize him at all. I just saw someone there.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, you recognized something.

Martha Beck:
I truly thought it was part of a team of people at this TV station that I should have known.

Rowan Mangan:
Probably because he had this look on his face like, “Yeah, yeah.” Not that this person is egotistical, but he probably had a like, “Oh, you probably recognize me. Your wife is making a terrible fool of herself right now.”

Martha Beck:
Well we had to go through a scanner. We had to put our handbags through a scanner.

Rowan Mangan:
A security thing, yeah.

Martha Beck:
So I was ruffled anyway because who knows what they’re going to find in there, right? So then there was this dude just standing there rocking a mustache and a hat, and I thought, “I’m supposed to know that man.”

Rowan Mangan:
She sticks her hand out like—

Martha Beck:
I stuck my hand out.

Rowan Mangan:
Like, “Hello!”

Martha Beck:
It was like a karate chop. It was like I was trying to impress a military man. “Here’s my hand!”

Rowan Mangan:
And not like a fey little homosexual Scot.

Martha Beck:
Oh, now you’re giving it away.

Rowan Mangan:
I know, I’m dropping hints.

Martha Beck:
You know what? I also am a fey homosexual little Scot. I mean American, but third generation back is Scottish.

Rowan Mangan:
Maybe that’s why you were so forthright with the handshake.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, I think that’s the way it is. You see someone from the Old Country and you’re just like, “Hello!”

Rowan Mangan:
You’re like little picts together. Little pictish fairies.

Martha Beck:
Yeah we are.

Rowan Mangan:
Aw.

Martha Beck:
Because some of the Scots are big and brawny because they were descended from the Anglo-Saxons.

Rowan Mangan:
No one cares. No one cares about that. I love you. Anyway, so to go on. Okay. There was another time when this happened, and I wanted to talk about that as well because, and it was a while ago, because as I say—

Martha Beck:
The same thing happened?

Rowan Mangan:
A similar thing. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Oh God.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m celebrity-adjacent-adjacent. And this was one of those times, and I dunno if we talked about it, but we actually went to a party once. Amazing, looking back, that we managed to get ourselves out of the house.

Martha Beck:
Oh, we never go to parties.

Rowan Mangan:
I know. We never get invited.

Martha Beck:
Oh no. Because we avoid even that. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
We went to a party and our friend Liz was there and she was introducing us to people. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Because everyone knows Liz and she knows everybody. And some of them we had met before through the Liz—

Martha Beck:
The Lizosphere.

Rowan Mangan:
The context of the Lizosphere. And so my brain was like in flip, flip, flip, flip, flip: “I know you, I don’t know you, I react socially. Oh, I’m autistic. I don’t know how to do this.” And then suddenly she’s like, “And this is Lucy.” And I was just like, “Hi!” I was like, “Oh, you for sure, for sure are ringing a bell. Come here.”

Martha Beck:
“I know you!”

Rowan Mangan:
And I gave her such a hugging, that beautiful woman. And the funny thing was that as I pulled away from the hug and actually recognized her as famous actress Lucy Liu from Charlie’s Angels and Sherlock, one of the great shows.

Martha Beck:
Such a good show.

Rowan Mangan:
And I realized what I’d done. She saw me realizing what I’d done, and she understood exactly what had happened. And it obviously was not an unfamiliar thing for her where people are just like, “It’s from somewhere… It’s good to see you again.” And she was, she just had this slight amusement in her eye of just like, “I know exactly what just happened.”

Martha Beck:
And she has such great eyes for slight amusement. She’s got this merry look to her eyes.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. She knew. She knew. She did. So I’ve shared a little shame of mine and of yours.

Martha Beck:
You didn’t sit on her damn lap.

Rowan Mangan:
No.

Martha Beck:
It’s so interesting—

Rowan Mangan:
I’d love to have.

Martha Beck:
Mm. Now that you mention it, so would I. I don’t think her thighs are squishy.

Rowan Mangan:
I bet they’re not.

Martha Beck:
Anyway, isn’t it interesting how you can look someone in the eyes and have this very complex emotional sequence of things going on and you can see that they see this sequence and it all happens in a fifth of a second.

Rowan Mangan:
Right! I know. It’s amazing. It really is. If you slowed it down, it would be like panic and artificial joy: “Oh, it’s you!” And then do something! Do something that you would do with someone familiar! Okay, I guess I’m going in for a hug. And then the moment of peace where you’re not making eye contact with them—because you’re holding them to your bosom—when your brain relaxes enough to go, “That’s fucking Lucy Liu, you idiot.” And then you pull away a little bit too suddenly because you shouldn’t have—

Martha Beck:
Leap shrieking to the other side of the room.

Rowan Mangan:
Because that was not the right thing to do to Lucy.

Martha Beck:
You know what you should have said to just throw her off the set? You should have just gone, “There’s a spider in your hair.” And it would’ve explained a whole different set of reactions and disconcerted her to the point where the whole incident would’ve just blurred. I think that’s the smart approach.

Rowan Mangan:
I was thinking maybe what I should have done is just go, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. For a minute I thought you were Lucy Liu.” And then just run.

Martha Beck:
That’s a good idea.

Rowan Mangan:
Made out. Yeah. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
All right. Should we get to our topic du jour?

Rowan Mangan:
Let’s.

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The topic of the day in this here podcast Bewildered, it’s about noisiness.

Martha Beck:
It’s about noise.

Rowan Mangan:
No, Marty, noisé. It’s about noisé. Noisé. I think you’ll find it’s pronounced noisé. The “e” has a little accent, thank you. Noisé.

Martha Beck:
Noisé.

Rowan Mangan:
All right. Hey, we all know that we live in a noisy culture, right?

Martha Beck:
Yes, we do.

Rowan Mangan:
I think it’s not, I’m not making a subtle point when I say we are subjected to noise, we don’t like silence, and I was thinking about how in radio world, dead air is the worst thing that you can possibly have. And that’s a second without noise filling it. It’s like one second of silence is the worst thing that can happen.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Pascal said that the reason for all our misery is that we’re unable to sit quietly alone in a room. And I don’t think I’ve mentioned this on the podcast before, but when Eckhart Tolle and Oprah did this webcast together, they did it every week. And he said, “Why don’t we just sit in silence for 30 seconds before we start and just ground in?” So she did that every week. And I was in the supermarket and there was a big tabloid: “Oprah pulled into a crazy cult!” And the reason that they, I mean, it was just a bonafide, a “crazy cult” was that they sat there without making any noise for almost half a minute, once a week. Crazy stuff.

Rowan Mangan:
So if I’m underprepared in future for this podcast, I’m going to go ahead and suggest that for 30 seconds, maybe longer…

Martha Beck:
That is a really good idea. Before I start my speech, as I think up my speech, let us sit in silence for 30 seconds.

Rowan Mangan:
Let’s just take some silence. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
We don’t do it.

Rowan Mangan:
No, we don’t. And we definitely are afraid of it. And part of that, I think, is just that our lives are almost built around various screeching and dinging, can I say? Between “Naaah!” kids and ding-ding-ding phone, and this is what Slack does for work. It goes like this—[pop, pop, pop]—sort of like that. It’s less annoying actually. It’s quite a nice soothing notification.

Martha Beck:
It’s pretty annoying.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Well, I may not be doing it justice. Anyway, so yeah, there’s all this dinging. There’s sirens if you’re in a city. And even if you’re not, there’s leaf blowers. More on that later.

Martha Beck:
Leaf blowers!

Rowan Mangan:
And the culture says, “Hey, you want to get stuff?”—which is the point of living in this culture, I think—”You want to get stuff? This is the price you pay. Dinging and screeching.” And let’s not even start on toddlers.

Martha Beck:
There are so many different noises that come out of my phone and my wristwatch without my invitation. When it’s time to take allergy medication, it goes shk-shk-shk. And then there are times it sings one song and times it sings another time and times it goes bong-biddly-bong-bong, and then it plays the piano in the morning. And I’m like, “What? I didn’t ask for this!” But it’s just continuous, and they keep adding different layers. I don’t know how many sounds they can actually make.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh infinite.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And I remember sitting with a client once who was going through a rough time and she started—I had a clock radio, this is way back in the old days. She was going through a difficult time and she got up and she started going through all the sounds on the radio until she got to something loud enough that she wanted to play back during our sessions.

Rowan Mangan:
You mean the stations? She was going through the radio stations?

Martha Beck:
Is that what they used to be called? Yes. She was going through stations.

Rowan Mangan:
Sounds, sounds, just she was going through the sounds.

Martha Beck:
I sat there looking at her and I thought, “This is really not functional. I need to pay attention to the role that sound and noise are playing in the lives of the people who come here because she is like, we could sit here and have a huge breakthrough moment and she’s going to be hearing the radio.” And I happen to know that of the five senses, hearing is the only one that can give full attention to just one information stream at a time. So you can smell cinnamon buns and stew both cooking, and it’s fine. You can smell them both. You can see all kinds of colors.

Rowan Mangan:
Thank you. I will.

Martha Beck:
You’re welcome. But yeah, if you’re hearing one song and you try to remember the tune to another, you can’t.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s like that thing how people have the TV on in the background, that has always been a mystery to me. So strange.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I think what— I was raised in a small house with 10 people, so I got really used to using my ADHD to laser focus on one sound and block out the others. But it’s extremely stressful. And so I learned to, as we say, habituate, but I’m not so sure that’s a good thing.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So there’s this phenomenon of habituation that I had to look up the word, but I think we all know that it’s that thing of when you live on a flight path. When I was a little kid and we didn’t have a phone, not because it was so long ago, but just because we were broke and we didn’t have a phone put in, so to communicate with my grandparents in Canada, we would record audio cassettes to them. Oh man, I’m dating myself in so many ways. And I used to listen to them back when I was older, the ones that we had sent. After my grandmother died, my dad brought them back and I could listen to them. And there was a time when we lived on a flight path and my parents would be talking away, “So anyway, here’s the news. This happened, that happened,” and a plane would come right over the top and they wouldn’t stop. They wouldn’t stop talking and they would be inaudible and just be like, “So anyway, she said to me…” Neither of my parents speak remotely like that.

Martha Beck:
No, they do not. Except your mother in her sleep sometimes.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, hm.

Martha Beck:
I’ve heard. I mean haven’t heard, I’ve heard tell that she can speak in her sleep with a very broad Australian accent.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Let’s not all dwell on the idea of Marty crouched in the corner watching my mother sleep.

Martha Beck:
I would do that. So it’s so innocent when I do that though.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh no, of course. It’s just creepy. So, yeah, we can habituate to that and it’s like our cognitive brain says, oh, you hear that all the time. You live near a level crossing, so you hear the ding-ding-ding of the things coming down. You don’t need to pay attention to that. So don’t worry about noticing that in future. Just let it fade into the background. So cognitively that’s happening. But our nervous system is different. It’s different. It’s different. It’s really different.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And as you all probably have heard many too many times, I did a book on anxiety and—

Rowan Mangan:
What?!

Martha Beck:
Yeah, I did. Yeah, probably forgot to mention it.

Rowan Mangan:
Anxiety. That’s a great topic.

Martha Beck:
And one thing I found is—I was talking to people about their anxiety—is they’d say, “No, I’m not anxious at all and there’s nothing that makes me anxious in my environment.” And if I said, “Sit really still and really allow yourself to relax,” they would say the sounds of traffic outside or the sound of a leaf blower is actually, there’s a background anxiety noise as well as a background audible noise. There was sort of an underpinning of anxiety that was linked to the actual sounds. And as we will see in a minute, research supports that.

Rowan Mangan:
So our brains are like, “No big deal.” But our nervous systems are like, “This is not right. This is not okay.” And sometimes, moreover, if I could use such a ridiculous antiquated term.

Martha Beck:
I’ll do it heretofore.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, bless you. I’ll—sometimes habituation doesn’t work. And I happen to, this topic is very close to my heart and my earballs because I have a super sensitive whole auditory thing. I think part of my autism profile is that I’m very, very, very sensitive to noises. I don’t enjoy them a lot of the time. And the worst thing in my world is when Lila starts talking to me and Marty starts talking to me at the same time. And it’s just like, it just shuts me down. It’s just like—

Martha Beck:
Why do you think we do it? I’m sorry. We don’t.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh no.

Martha Beck:
We never do that? No. But I remember when we were first getting together, I’d do the big American, “How are ya?”

Rowan Mangan:
Aaah!

Martha Beck:
And you would– exactly. I had to learn to keep my voice lower and my energy lower, actually. We’ll talk about that later, but I didn’t know that Americans were so much louder than Australians, but we are.

Rowan Mangan:
Than everyone else. Than everyone else. Listen, I’m just going to check in with our non-American listeners, who can spot the American? Not spot, but hear the American tourist in a crowded place?

Martha Beck:
Surely some other country is that loud?

Rowan Mangan:
No, no.

Martha Beck:
Some small atoll in the Pacific?

Rowan Mangan:
And yet here I am and I’m making peace with it somehow. So yeah.

Martha Beck:
You’re habituated, but not completely.

Rowan Mangan:
I definitely have auditory processing stuff. If I’m in a place where there’s a lot of background noise, even if it’s not bothering me remotely, I have so much trouble. I start watching people’s lips to try. You’re sitting across the table from me in a noisy place. I’m starting to try and read your lips. I’m craning towards you and stuff. So I definitely, and it doesn’t take much for me to just go, that’s too much sound. Stop it.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Just freaks you right out. And I, having learned to just, I can read a book in a room with people shouting at me and be completely focused on what I’m reading and I can select one voice to listen to. But I’m telling you, it’s like lifting a heavy weight. It is so hard. However, there are things I cannot do. And I think this has to do with my autism profile and it makes me wonder who doesn’t have an autism profile actually. But mine is called misophonia. I learned this late in life that I have misophonia. There are certain noises that make me absolutely insane. One of those is leaf blowers.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I don’t think that’s misophonia for you so much as there’s an ideological part of it.

Martha Beck:
I don’t know what it is about them. They’re always there and they’re just, when I did Tim Ferriss’s podcast, he also has very sensitive senses and he has super acute vision, hearing, everything, and he hates leaf blowers too. And then I found out online that Cate Blanchet also hates leaf blowers to the point where she will leave a red carpet and go on a harangue saying, “All they’re doing is blowing leaves from one part of the outdoors to another part of the outdoors. Look at their faces. They know it doesn’t make any sense. They’re just destroying us with their sounds.” Thank you for letting me get that out.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh no, of course. This is a safe space.

Martha Beck:
And then the other one that is common with misophonia is certain people eating. And what’s weird is it’s not all the people. I had seven siblings and one of my brothers ate in such a way that I literally wanted to pick up my dinner plate and just smash him in the face with it. He made me crazy as a little kid.

Rowan Mangan:
Really?

Martha Beck:
My adored older brother.

Rowan Mangan:
And did that genetic tendency get passed on in any way, Marty?

Martha Beck:
Well, I have to say, we might as well, we might as well surface this.

Rowan Mangan:
It’ll make us feel better.

Martha Beck:
Sometime during lockdown, Adam decided that it was more—

Rowan Mangan:
Marty’s adult son who lives with us.

Martha Beck:
My adult son with Down syndrome, who lives with us. He decided that small sort of primal noises of appreciation would spice up our lives.

Rowan Mangan:
His life, anyway. I dunno if he was thinking about ours.

Martha Beck:
So he doesn’t, like if he were to take a sip of water, I’ll take a sip of water here and it goes like that—there, I just swallowed a sip of water. Well, he would go, first of all, he’d preface it with, I have formed the intention to take a sip of water. Then he would like reverently… It’s great, but I can’t stand it. [Demonstrates loud slurping and gulping.] “Ahhhh.”

Rowan Mangan:
It’s the “Ahhh” at the end.

Martha Beck:
And everything he does, he sits down. And I just have the misophonia. I love him to the ends of the earth, and he’s a wonderful person who’s never done anything wrong in his life, but there are times I literally want to pick him up by the ankles and just swing him around and round and then let go. I’ve admitted that.

Rowan Mangan:
I love the very strong imagery that you paint between your brother and your son. The violent things you’d like to do to them. It’s a powerful— misophonia is a powerful thing. I Googled it.

Martha Beck:
Well. Yeah. And it underlines our point that this is something we should really be paying attention to. Yes!

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
We’re doing it a lot.

Rowan Mangan:
Let’s broaden it out a little bit past the glug-glug and back to the sort of environment of the culture that we live in. There’s this background noise that happens that we are mostly habituated to, and that does actually cause real damage as we saw recently in the place where we get our most important information: Instagram.

Martha Beck:
Yes, we saw it in Instagram.

Rowan Mangan:
I say that before to set Marty up so she can’t come across too Harvard (drink) about how she presents this.

Martha Beck:
Well, I’ll let you tell them about this study because it’s fascinating. But I have been aware for decades.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, sure.

Martha Beck:
Of other studies.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, others! Can you say where?

Martha Beck:
And you can find them online, but it’s not easy or free.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m sure it’s better if you go to a library and go through a card catalog.

Martha Beck:
Probably. But there are numerous studies, and I recently in preparation for this, looked up what’s called the meta study where they take all these studies that have been done on a topic.

Rowan Mangan:
They study the studies.

Martha Beck:
They study the studies.

Rowan Mangan:
Like a dream within a dream.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, so they can get higher statistical samples and get higher degrees of probability and it’s more accurate. So they found out, I made a long list of things that go wrong when we just hear traffic noise. A list so long and so pleasing to me—

Rowan Mangan:
I made her delete it.

Martha Beck:
Amygdala upheaval. See, if I had it in front of me, I wouldn’t have said that. Amygdala, I can’t remember. But it triggers your amygdala to make you very afraid. And it causes sleep disturbance, it causes depression—

Rowan Mangan:
It doesn’t matter. We know that it’s bad for you.

Martha Beck:
Alpha waves, it keeps you from having alpha waves.

Rowan Mangan:
Hm.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, so traffic noise.

Martha Beck:
So it’s bad, it’s bad, bad, bad. And these are people who are habituated, and they’re still having these negative health effects, mental health effects, all kinds of diminished joy in living just because of the noise of culture.

Rowan Mangan:
And we’re not aware of it. Which is kind of the key part is that it’s damaging us at the nervous system level and we can be completely oblivious. So then the Instagram, as I fondly to call it, the Instagram study that only showed up on my feed because she’s been hijacking my algorithm with cute animal videos. So then I read with a nice video to help me. It was a nice little visual to keep me interested. There’s a study, 2022 peer-reviewed, if you don’t mind. It wasn’t a dream within a dream meta study of studies. It was just a study. And what they found is they tested people, well, let me keep it simple. Okay?

Martha Beck:
Cut to the chase.

Rowan Mangan:
Birdsong traffic test mood. Birdsong. Yes. Traffic. Not good. Not good, folks. Not good at all. And actually what was cool was that if there was a really diverse amount of birdsong, it was even more exciting. I mean not exciting, positive exciting—calming and mood lifting, regulating for the nervous system if there were more. Different types.

Martha Beck:
Gosh, when I woke up in the Adelaide Hills in Australia, when we went to see your folks, it was like waking up on another planet I have never heard—

Rowan Mangan:
Because they were on a flight path.

Martha Beck:
I’ve gone all over the world and you wake up and there are bird songs and they’re different in every part. I mean in Europe, the first time I woke up in Switzerland and heard, I think it was nightingales.

Rowan Mangan:
Cuckoo clock?

Martha Beck:
No, that was just like cultural cliche-ism. No, I heard nightingales and I just went, “Oh my God, that’s where classical music comes from.” But in Australia it was so different, these magpies, which in America or Europe, wherever I’ve been, go, “myeahhh.”

Rowan Mangan:
They’re much more pleasing.

Martha Beck:
There’s absolutely no sound like it.

Rowan Mangan:
[Vocalizes like bird]

Martha Beck:
Close enough. I may have you follow me around making that noise, but it’s like that. But it’s as if they’re playing some kind of instrument made of glass bulbs or something. I just remember waking up and sitting up in bed and just waiting for it to come again. And there were other bird songs, there were galahs and there are cockatoos and stuff in Australia. I mean the birds there are insanely amazing. And it was so uplifting. I couldn’t believe how happy it made me.

Rowan Mangan:
Well that’s good.

Martha Beck:
So now I’m going to make you do it for me every morning.

Rowan Mangan:
Beautiful.

Martha Beck:
Another place that we’ve both, oh, keep going.

Rowan Mangan:
When you see a galah, what do you say?

Martha Beck:
Ya bloody galah.

Rowan Mangan:
There you go. Well done.

Martha Beck:
There you go. No bloody road since—Oh no, that’s kangaroos.But if they ran into a galah, it’d be like, “No bloody galah since the bloody galah.” Anyway, we’ve both heard it in Africa too. South Africa. And I once read a book called The Great Animal Orchestra about how soundscapes affect us physiologically and psychologically.

Rowan Mangan:
Was it a meta study?

Martha Beck:
No, but it was a compilation of many studies.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s what a meta study is.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, well, it was one person, so it didn’t count.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s like a dream within a dream.

Martha Beck:
It starts, this book, which I really highly recommend. It starts with describing the call of a single francolin, which is a bird native to the South African scrub. And the francolin calls first, and then you start to hear all the bee eaters and fish eagles. And the diversity of bird life is amazing. And it says this is the soundscape we evolved to hear. And it’s the one that most positively affects our nervous system and we can never have it back. It’s gone. And I thought, “No, it isn’t. That’s exactly what I hear when I wake up at Londolozi.” Doesn’t it affect you waking up in that place and hearing the sounds of the bush? Is it as deep for you as it is for me?

Rowan Mangan:
I love the birdsong in South Africa. It takes my brain quite a long time to come online to audio in the morning. So it’s not waking up to anything is not something I experience. Just horror, blind horror, you know, “What fresh hell is this?” is what I wake up to. But I know what you’re saying. And yeah. And plus the birds have got shit to say over there. Last time I was there, the wonderful Sharvati came bustling out of her house and said, I dunno what bird it was, you probably know. And she said, “Oh, I just need to come and look down here because I can hear them saying there’s a leopard.”

Martha Beck:
Yeah, what was different?

Rowan Mangan:
What sort of bird was that?

Martha Beck:
What would that have been? I don’t know if it would’ve been a hoopoe or there’s one—there’s the go-away birds, the gray—

Rowan Mangan:
Anyway, it doesn’t matter. And she hadn’t even been listening for it, but she’s not getting habituated to any alarm calls around her house and her grandchildren. And so she’s just like, “They said it was a leopard, so I came outside to check.”

Martha Beck:
So an alarm call is a noise that an animal or a bird makes that says there is a predator in the neighborhood or there is some kind of natural disaster or whatever. And the interesting thing about them is that they sound alarming even to a human ear. Like the birds will be twitter, twitter, twitter, twitter. And then they’ll go, weet, weet—

Rowan Mangan:
“Oh, shit, shit. Did you guys see that?”

Martha Beck:
I can make a monkey alarm call for leopards.

Rowan Mangan:
Go on.

Martha Beck:
[Vocalizes] I thought it was birds. It wasn’t. It was monkeys. And that’s usually a leopard, maybe a lion or a snake even. But they bounce around on your roof and make that noise, and it is alarming. And that’s what alarm noises are made for. They’re supposed to be very attention -getting to say, “There is something dangerous in the area. Pay attention.” And what’s interesting is if you walk through nature, and most people don’t have this sensibility, but people raised in the bush taught me this, that if you walk through a natural environment, there will be dead silence around you in a circle. And that is the animal life just going to ground. They’re going to freeze and try to let you go past.

Rowan Mangan:
Because you’re the predator.

Martha Beck:
Around that circle of silence is a circle of alarm calls, squirrels going [squeals] and birds, whatever. And it’s in a circle that moves with you as you move and other animals are going away from you. So you don’t actually realize, and I can say this, after sitting in the forest for six years in California, you have no idea how much animal traffic is out there silently going about its business when we are not there.

Rowan Mangan:
So it’s interesting because when we think about an alarm call, that alarm call is intended both to express a sense of alarm and to communicate the need for alarm, right?

Martha Beck:
Be alarmed.

Rowan Mangan:
Scary, big thing with sharp teeth coming this way.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Or I’m in dire danger, please stop the bleeding. That kind of thing.

Rowan Mangan:
Right, and so it’s like you have to wonder that we’re talking about noise, but noise is frequency and it makes me—and I’m about to get woo—but it makes me wonder where does the sound bit end, which is just, this is how many hurts or whatever. I don’t know how it works. And where does my intention of my alarm call the frequency, the energetic frequency that I’m also emitting, broadcasting, transmitting? How do those interact with each other? Does that make sense?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Because when I sat on that woman’s lap and she made a sound and I made a sound, in my sound, there was not a need for attention so much as a need to disappear. But her noise was definitely an alarm call and it was—

Rowan Mangan:
I just picture Sharvati coming out of her house going, “They say there’s a white lady sitting on their lap.”

Martha Beck:
So as I fled the scene, I could feel the shock in those two people that were in that car at what had happened and they didn’t keep making sounds, but I swear to God, I could feel their alarm following me.

Rowan Mangan:
That was not your imagination.

Martha Beck:
There’s a reason that it’s so incredibly awful to have a baby screaming on a plane when the plane itself is making this deafening noise. And yet it’s the baby noise we can’t handle. Why?

Rowan Mangan:
Good point.

Martha Beck:
Because our evolution doesn’t have anything to say about the noise of an airplane is, except, “It’s loud, I’m afraid. Okay, nothing’s happening I guess I’ll deal with it.” But about a baby crying, our nervous system gets very into it. That means I need to pay attention. There is a baby in distress, I need to go there. Or if someone starts having a panic attack, this has happened to me on planes before and just starts screaming on a plane, the whole plane is like, “Ahhh!” Everybody else starts screaming. It is an alarm call of a human being, and we evolved to react to it with intense focus and activity.

Rowan Mangan:
And so if we’re programmed by evolution to react a certain way to certain frequencies, and that sound frequencies convey emotional urgency, is it possible that the culture can hijack that evolutionary tendency and make money out of it?

Martha Beck:
Oh, so much money, yes. [Advertising] people all over the world are going, “What noise gets the most attention? Oh, it’s the sound of something that’s highly alarming. Let’s make—yeah, ding ding!” And it’s interesting because when I first started hearing the dings, it wasn’t as intense. Once I learned to connect them with, “That sound means I’m supposed to pay attention to someone,” those dings have the same quality for me as a baby crying. Like,”I can’t pay attention. No I won’t. I mustn’t. I’m trying to focus on something else.” But it’s not like a birdsong outside the window, which truly does not bother me at all. Right?

Rowan Mangan:
Because it’s not focused on you. It’s just happening beside you but not at you. And the ding is coming at you and the baby crying is coming at you. There’s a level of focus to it and demand in it.

Martha Beck:
And when you have two people talking to you, let alone more, if there are three or four people talking to you, it is beyond belief. It’s incredibly distressing for you.

Rowan Mangan:
It is. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
But you love walking along the streets in New York and hearing the babble of human voices in conversation. Doesn’t bother you at all, right?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And that’s why I think there’s something, there’s two things, I reckon. Thing one: If it’s pointing at me, if it’s someone demanding something from me and that can be a ding of a text message or a screech of a child, “Mummy, there’s poo in my pants,” for instance, those things are coming at me, and that’s really different from something being ambient. The other thing is that I really think that, and this isn’t necessarily about an evolutionary thing, I think it’s, or maybe it is, and I’m just looking at it through a woo lens, but I think that emotional frequency is conveyed through noise. And so I think you can have a crowd—someone, there’s a truck reversing outside.

Martha Beck:
I heard that and I was like, what is that now? What is that noise?

Rowan Mangan:
I’m going to run you all off! Emotional frequency carried by noise, so you could have a distressed, angry crowd. No, maybe not angry, but they’re being discontent in a crowd, and that noise would hit your nervous system, especially if you’re a sensitive little bunny like I am. And you are like a lot of us Other Butterflies are.

Martha Beck:
Other Butterflies.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s going to hit me differently. But I was saying to you when we were chatting about this topic that if I’m in New York walking down the street and it’s like Sunday brunch time and there’s all the restaurants and everyone’s sitting outside having a lovely conversation, that can be quite noisy—and it enlivens me. Its effect on my nervous system is net positive. And I don’t think that’s association or any sort of mental gymnastics that’s happening. I genuinely think it hits my nervous system differently because it contains a different emotional frequency. For what it’s worth, probably bullshit, but that’s how I feel.

Martha Beck:
Oh, well what I’m getting out of this is that there’s a certain amount of reaction to noise that we can’t control. You could hear traffic noise, be habituated to it, think nothing of it, and have it destroying your sleep and keeping you from alpha waves and triggering your amygdala to make you afraid and you don’t even know that’s happening. And if there’s an alarm call, you’re going to have a very strong reaction and you can’t really control that. But there’s also a level in which you have some say, you have some deciding power. Because it’s about what the sound means to you. And if you hear a sound two ways, if an American says, “Hi y’all!” What does that mean? What do you make that mean? In the voice of one of the coaches I used to train, she would say, “What do you make that mean?” If you hear people in a crowd and it sounds this way, what do you make it mean, or that way? No?

Rowan Mangan:
Okay, can I just tell you, I mean it’s so layered because if I heard that and I didn’t have any other context, I would think, “Act straight and don’t talk politics” if I heard “Howdy, y’all” or something like that.

Martha Beck:
Oh, wow.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I only have a limited amount of cultural context. And so if I hear just generic Southern, yeah.

Martha Beck:
That is so interesting.

Rowan Mangan:
If it’s coming out of a white person.

Martha Beck:
That is, that’s so interesting. And I can imagine that there are many, many, many ways that people might speak to me or interact with me or cause noise that I would take to mean something dangerous or take to mean, would make me uneasy. It’s interesting because we were talking also as we were chatting about my favorite spiritual teacher Byron Katie, and how I was with her at her apartment in Santa Monica, and she was exulting, just joyful about the babel of voices walking past on the sidewalk. And then she said, “Oh, I know why I wanted to buy this place, it’s because this was the worst place in the world to me until I had my sort of breakthrough experience.” She had this major massive shift in her life that was an enlightenment experience. She was miserable before it. She was happy ever after. She’s still happy. But it was the very thing that had disturbed her the most when she interpreted people as frightening things. She just interpreted people as being frightening, I think. And then after she had a breakthrough, things didn’t mean the same things to her.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, it is coming through a filter is what you’re saying.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And I think maybe we have some ability to adjust the filter. I mean, what if we went to all the people in all those meta studies who were having a negative effect from traffic noise and said, “Let’s meditate on the sound of traffic noise and make it mean something soothing, make it mean something beautiful.” I don’t think it’s in our nature, but I think maybe it’s in the range of possibility.

Rowan Mangan:
So interesting. It’s interesting when you think about traffic noise and you think about: steady drone of a traffic noise on a freeway is not a million miles from the steady trickle of a river or something. Not trickle—

Martha Beck:
Or waves.

Rowan Mangan:
But waves are one after the other. Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. Who knows? So with having a baby, there’s a lot of advice that if you want them to nap, they nap so lightly that any noise in the house and that’s why people creep around, and so white noise machines have become really popular. And I have one in Lila’s room, she’s now four, and it’s like it comes on a schedule. And so that’s been on—

Martha Beck:
So does everyone just automatically know what white noise is?

Rowan Mangan:
I dunno. So I think a lot of them do. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
It’s a signal sent everywhere between 20 hertz and 20,000 hertz where the human hearing range sort of exists. White noise just activates every level at the same time.

Rowan Mangan:
White noise transmits on every frequency.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, that’s right. And it just goes [vocalizes] and you can’t differentiate other sounds.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And so the idea is that it quickly habituates the brain to not notice it. And I can vouch for that because I go in there every night and I can’t tell if it’s on or not. And sometimes I go back and I’m like, is that on? Yeah. So it definitely is easy to habituate to.

Martha Beck:
I find it really, really grating and I want to get away from it. So interesting, right?

Rowan Mangan:
But I wonder if you were in there with it every night if it would be different?

Martha Beck:
Yeah, and if I came to associate it with peace and sleep and lying in bed, yeah. Then I thought white noise was the whole spiel, but apparently they have all colors of noise now.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh yeah. It’s a very colorful thing, noise. So yeah, because I’m always looking for something to drown out the horrifying reality of life so I can do my spreadsheets better. And so I’ve usually got something playing, music if I feel in a certain mood, and white noise is not good for me to work to because—and I think a lot of people find that—it can set your teeth on edge a little bit. And so yeah, they’ve made other ones that are more in the mid -range of what we can hear. And then it’s almost like the sound is a little bit blunted. So green noise is the one supposedly that sounds most like the natural world, and that’s very pleasant.

Martha Beck:
I love it. Love it.

Rowan Mangan:
You can just put them on loops on YouTube and it’s lovely. It really is.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, it’s like 10 hours of uninterrupted green noise and it just is wonderful. I’ve never heard it till we’re talking today about this.

Rowan Mangan:
What I want now is a track that has a bed of green noise and then has very diverse birdsong laid over that. That could be just like my resting background.

Martha Beck:
You could totally do that.

Rowan Mangan:
We could do that.

Martha Beck:
And that’s one way that inexpensively for anybody who’s got phones and laptops, whatever, you could put green noise on one thing and birdsong on the other thing, two different things for free and maybe really affect your nervous system. And then there’s this thing we got talking about where a person whose nervous system is completely regulated can regulate other people.

Rowan Mangan:
Because we feel like we’re just receptors when we’re experiencing sound. And we don’t think of ourselves necessarily as transmitters as well.

Martha Beck:
But I have met people who walk in a pool of silence and people walk toward them talking loudly and get softer and then just shut the F up when they go past. Eckhart Tolle was, I saw that happen around him. We were teaching at the same thing. And everywhere he went, there was a circle of silence. It was so cool.

Rowan Mangan:
That happens with Lucy Liu as well. It’s mostly shocked silence as people frantically try to remember where they met her.

Martha Beck:
Just let her meet that small Scottish actor and they can trade, trade their own stories. But I, actually, I had an experience of being able to broadcast silence maybe. I don’t know what you’d call it, but I’d been in Africa for a full month with, no, this was before they were really wired up for the internet. So no internet, no phone, no email. It would come in once a day, I’d deal with it. It couldn’t come to me in the place where I lived. I had almost no possessions with me.

Rowan Mangan:
There was no internet, no email, no possessions. I mean all the stuff that comes to us through wifi.

Martha Beck:
But I had spent a lot of the time meditating and I’d gotten really, I heard a guy the other day, he told me, “I meditated for a whole year, 10 minutes a day.” I was like, “Really? How did it affect you?” He was like, “I hated it, but I sure effing got good at meditating.” And I was like, “Oh, I love you sweetheart. Try it for six hours.” I would meditate for a long time and I would hear the circle of alarm calls shrinking around me and the pool of dead silence, dead air. Maybe that’s why we hate dead air so much. It means there’s a predator right there. But the alarm calls would get smaller and smaller. And then I could hear the chitter-chatter of the regular birdsong outside the circle of alarm calls. And then the alarm calls would maybe be one bird right over my head. And then it went away. And suddenly animals were just everywhere. So I went back to Phoenix and I took a walk in the evening on a golf course because it’s the only place you can stand to walk in summer heat in Phoenix. It’s cooler on the golf course. So I was walking along—

Rowan Mangan:
Suburban hellscapes.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, I was hearing—but it has a lot of bird life. The Sonoran Desert is the most biologically diverse desert in the world. So there were mockingbirds. There were—

Rowan Mangan:
No, I totally believe you, but it’s still a fricking golf course.

Martha Beck:
On the other hand, I think they call it Phoenix because birds frequently just burst into flame spontaneously there because I almost did. Anyway, I could walk in a circle of silence and I pulled in my energy and I pulled in my energy and I know it was energetic. I’m sorry if it sounds woo-woo, it’s a real thing. And if I don’t pull it in the morning before Ro’s had her coffee, we get into problems.

Rowan Mangan:
Mm-hm.

Martha Beck:
But I felt the stillness and I felt, but not the dead air, the peace of the normal birdsong where they’re just talking to each other. And I was walking along and there were birds in all the trees. And then from behind me came this huge great horned owl, absolutely silent, landed on a branch 20 feet in front of me. I kept walking right under him and walked a few feet. And then he came from behind me again and he went to the next tree and the next tree and he walked, he stayed with me for half a mile.

Rowan Mangan:
What do you think that is?

Martha Beck:
Oh, I’m going to sound really airy fairy if I talk about this, but look at the internet if you want. You can joke all you want about my internet being full of animals, but we see that they are doing things like going to get help for another animal. A dolphin will go get help for a turtle that’s stuck in a plastic thing. And once it’s, the turtle’s been freed by a human, the dolphin brings it a sponge as a reward. There’s a lot going on out there. And all of it is nonverbal, obviously. And some of it is sound, but a lot of it is beyond the 20 to 20,000 hertz. Maybe it’s some form of sound still.
But there is a love of affinity, I think. In Hinduism they call it the “splendor of recognition” when the consciousness in one being recognizes that the consciousness in another being is just like itself. It’s like when babies, one of the things I love most about babies is that they’re obsessed with babies. You’ll have a one-year-old or a one-and-a-half-year-old in a stroller, pushing ’em along, and if they see even a 2-year-old, they’ll go, “Baby, it’s a baby.” I think there is this love that is communicated when the noise of the culture is gone and the soundscape and emotion-scape of our true nature is simply allowed to find its homeostasis, find its natural level.

Rowan Mangan:
So we can kind of attend to that in a way. And if we want our nervous systems to feel wilder and less co-opted by the interests of the culture, we can move towards that kind of diversity and song that we encounter in a healthy and unafraid ecosystem. Right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. It’s never meant to be one voice. It’s always meant to be a symphony. And the first, I mean, just talking about this subject got me more aware and more sensitized. And I think once you just remember to sense back into your nervous system and allow your reactions to sound, even if they say, “I don’t like that leaf blower, or I don’t like the traffic noise,” at least that’s starting from a true place to say, “What can I do now with my green noise machine?”

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, so we can be sensitive to our sensitivity and try to manage what’s coming in. But we also can remember that we can also choose to transmit a certain frequency too, and that creatures around us, including human creatures on some level, are being affected by that. And I think both of those things are a big part of how we….

Martha and Rowan:
Stay wild!

Rowan Mangan: 
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