No one has lasted more than 55 minutes in the quietest place on Earth

We all crave a bit of peace and quiet every now and then – some time to be alone with our thoughts.

But silence isn’t as golden as we’ve been led to believe, according to the people who’ve been to the quietest place on Earth.

You might expect this to be in a remote part of some great desert whereas, in actual fact, it’s located in a research lab in Minnesota.

Inside the anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories, it is so silent you can hear your own blood flowing and bones moving.

Made of 3.3ft-thick fibreglass acoustic wedges and double walls of insulated steel and thick concrete, the room absorbs 99.99 per cent of sound.

The conditions within its Fort Knox-style walls are so intense that the longest amount of time anyone’s been able to endure in there is 55 minutes.

“We challenge people to sit in the chamber in the dark,” the lab’s founder Steven Orfield told Hearing Aid Know. “When it’s quiet, ears will adapt. The quieter the room, the more things you hear. You’ll hear your heart beating, sometimes you can hear your lungs, hear your stomach gurgling loudly.

“In the anechoic chamber, you become the sound."

What he means by this is that, with the absence of external noise, your ears are forced to adapt to unimaginable silence and start to focus inwards on your own mind and bodily functions.

Furthermore, after as little as 30 minutes subjects begin to hallucinate.

Orfield explained that it is also impossible to stay in the room for more than half an hour without sitting down because a person’s orientation is largely grounded in the sounds they make when moving.

"How you orient yourself is through sounds you hear when you walk," he told the Daily Mail. In the anechoic chamber, you don't have any cues.

"You take away the perceptual cues that allow you to balance and manoeuvre. If you're in there for half an hour, you have to be in a chair."

The Quietest Place on Earth: Orfield Laboratoriesyoutu.be

For anyone who reckons they could top that 55-minute record, it is possible to experience the chamber for yourself.

The Laboratories offer a tour, named “The Anechoic Experience”, which enables participants to take on the challenge, provided they’re willing to fork out a cool $600 (around £470) per hour for the privilege.

The Orfield website states: “We have witnessed many seeming miracles, some of which have explanations and some of which remain mysteries, as a result of time spent in our anechoic chamber.

“We remain curious about the nature of the chamber's impact on all people, its therapeutic properties, and how it can influence human perception. While anechoic chambers are traditionally used to study products, ours is becoming also about the people.

“The Anechoic Experience is designed to be an opportunity to personally inquire about the chamber's therapeutic and spiritual effects.”

We reckon we might be better off just lying in bed with the duvet over our heads next time we want a moment's peace.

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