More on noise pollution

A couple of weeks after I posted a blog on noise pollution (pet peeve of mine), The New York Times published the latest research on the effects of noise on health. According to the detailed studies by more than 25 researchers, here is a bit of what they discovered:

• Unpleasant noise goes from your ears to the amygdala part of your brain—essentially a stress detection center. If the amygdala is chronically overactivated by noise, the reactions begin to produce harmful effects:
• Your endocrine system can overact, causing too much cortisol, adrenaline, and other chemicals to course through your body.
• Your sympathetic nervous system can become hyperactivated, quickening the heart rate, raising blood pressure, and triggering the production of inflammatory cells.

Over time, the above changes can lead to inflammation, hypertension, and plaque buildup in arteries, increasing the risk of heart disease, heart attacks and stroke. After analyzing the brain scans and health records of hundreds of people at Massachusetts General Hospital, researchers found that those who lived in areas with high levels of transportation noise were more likely to have highly activated amygdalae (plural form of amygdala), arterial inflammation and—within five years—major cardiac events.

The decibel scale of noise is logarithmic, not linear: with every 10-decibel increase, the sense of loudness to your ear generally doubles. Thus, while a quiet room has a decibel level of 27, and that of a hair dryer is 87, to your ear, the sound of the hair drier is 66 times that of the quiet room.

The noises mentioned in the article tended to be those made from jets, trains, cars, leaf blowers, and similar noise-making machines. Reader comments complained about restaurant noise, loud music, and barking dogs. I never thought about barking dogs. Those in our neighborhood don’t bother me. In fact, it’s about the only sound we hear, and it’s not nearby.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.