This TED Talk features sleep and noise researcher Matthias Basner, recorded live at TEDMed 2018.

Do you hear that?

Do you know what that is?

Silence. The sound of silence. Simon and Garfunkel wrote a song about it,

but silence is a pretty rare commodity these days, and we're all paying a price for it, in terms of our health.

A surprisingly big prize, as it turns out. Luckily, there are things we can do right now, both individually and as a society, to better

protect our health that give us more of the benefits of the sounds of silence.

I assume that most of you know that too much noise is bad for your hearing.

Whenever you leave a concert or a bar and you have that ringing in your ears,

you can be certain that you have done some damage to your hearing,

likely permanent.

And that's very important.

However, noise affects our health in many different ways beyond hearing.

They're last well known,

but they are just as dangerous as the auditory effects.

So what do we mean when we talk about noise?

Well, noise is defined as unwanted sound,

and as such both has a physical component, the sound,

and a psychological component, the circumstances that

make the sound unwanted. A very good example is a rock concert. A person attending the rock concert,

being exposed to 100 decibels, does not think of the music as noise. This person likes the band

and even paid $100 for the ticket, so no matter how loud

...