Drop Dead Healthy

The Ears

The Quest for Quiet

WE TOOK OUR THREE SONS to Benihana for dinner tonight. It’s their favorite restaurant, thanks to the unbeatable combination of airborne food and machete-size knives.

But healthy it’s not.

First, there’s the food, an orgy of salt and grease. Second, there’s the smoke from all the grills, which fills the room and is eyerubbingly thick, what I imagine it’d be like in a Charles de Gaulle Airport lounge circa 1965.

But what I notice tonight is the noise. The hiss of the soy sauce on the grill, the escalating chatter of the crowd. And my sons. God love them, but my sons are loud beyond comprehension. (Whenever I ask my son Zane to be quiet because his mom is napping, he’ll walk by her room shouting, “TIPTOE! TIPTOE!”)

Tonight, they’re each carrying around a little plastic trumpet they were given at a friend’s birthday. Interesting choice for a party favor. How about handing my kids a pack of Marlboros and some razors? I might have preferred that.

They’ve been tooting their horns since we left the gymnastics-themed party, so I feel like I’ve been followed around by my own private South African soccer game. Right before the appetizers come, we finally pry the ghastly things from their hands.

My goodness, it’s a loud world. I’ve started to become aware of this more and more during my health project. Just spend an hour listening. The chirping text messages, the droning airplanes, the flatulent trucks, the howling cable pundits, the chiming MacBooks, the crunching orange foodlike snacks.

Thanks to my reading, I know that noise is not a minor nuisance. No, noise is one of the great underappreciated health hazards of our time, damaging not just our hearing, but our brain and heart. It’s the secondhand smoke of our ears. Some say even worse, like aural mustard gas.

Noise pollution doesn’t get the attention of A-list diseases. There are no parades or ribbons or celebrity spokespeople. But there are a handful of brave, slightly eccentric crusaders raising their voices against the onslaught of noise. One of them—the Mother Jones of the movement—is a psychology professor at the City University of New York named Arline Bronzaft. She agrees to let me visit at her Upper East Side apartment.

A petite woman with short brown hair, Bronzaft lives in an apartment that is, appropriately, shielded from most traffic noise. It’s filled with photos of her beloved Yankees and her equally beloved grandson, who recently had a nice, restrained five-piece band at his bar mitzvah. “My daughter said to the musicians, ‘If you make it too loud, my mother will disinherit me,’” says Bronzaft.

We sit in her kitchen to talk noise.

What’s the problem with this high-decibel world?

“The most obvious one is hearing loss,” she says.

Around 26 million adults are walking around with noise-induced hearing loss. And with our omnipresent earbuds, that number is bound to rise.

Even without earbuds, we naturally lose hearing as we age, as the sensory hair cells inside the cochlea erode. Babies can hear sounds that are twenty thousand cycles per second, while the average adult can hear at sixteen thousand cycles per second. Our ability to hear higher registers goes first, which means that the voices of women and children are silenced sooner, as if God were W. C. Fields.

Hearing loss is bad enough, but it’s not even the most pressing problem. Noise has a surprisingly potent effect on our stress level, cardiovascular system, and concentration. Just go back to our Paleo ancestor for a minute. In caveman times, a loud noise signaled a threat—an angry mastodon, perhaps. So noise activates the infamous fight-or-flight response: high adrenaline and high blood pressure. Nowadays, we’re bombarded by loud noises almost all day long, meaning our fight-or-flight instinct gets little downtime. One review found that people who work noisy jobs suffered two to three times the heart problems as those who work in quiet settings. In his book In Pursuit of Silence, George Prochnik cites a former World Health Organization official who estimates—with perhaps a bit of alarmism—that “45,000 fatal heart attacks per year may be attributable to noise-related cardiovascular strain.”

Something starts whirring in Bronzaft’s kitchen.

“What’s that sound?” I ask.

“The refrigerator,” she says. “When I found out it made that noise, I was shocked.”

Noise harms the ears and the heart—but it also wreaks havoc on the brain.

Our wise founding fathers knew this back in the 1700s. “When they wrote the Constitution in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, they realized noise was going to disrupt them because the horses and wagons would clatter over the cobblestones,” Bronzaft says. “So they packed dirt on the cobblestones to lessen the noise of passing traffic.”

That’s right. Noise is unpatriotic. (And quite possibly fascist. I read a quote from Hitler that he “couldn’t have won Germany without a bullhorn.”)

Bronzaft was one of the first to show scientifically that noise messes with the mind. In 1970, she was working as a transportation adviser to the mayor of New York, helping to design the subway map. She wasn’t even focused on noise pollution. (And oddly, she says that she isn’t overly sensitive to noise; she became interested in it as a public health problem.)

She conducted a landmark study at a public school in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood. Some of the classrooms faced directly out on an elevated subway track. Every five minutes the students heard a train rattle by. Other classrooms were tucked on the opposite side of the building, away from the noise. The difference? By the sixth grade, the kids in the quiet classrooms were about one year ahead in reading.

Her conclusions have since been backed up by a pile of other studies, both on students and adults. As George Prochnik writes, even “moderate noise from white-noise machines, air conditioners and background television, for example, can still undermine children’s language acquisition.”

When Bronzaft started, the antinoise movement was seen somewhere between organic foods and mandatory clothes for Greek sculpture on the kookiness scale. Nowadays, it’s edging ever closer to the mainstream. There are more noise-reducing ceilings, altered flight patterns, and warning labels on products. There are activists all over the country tilting at wind turbines, motocross raceways, and leaf blowers. “This is not just a big-city problem,” says Bronzaft.

It’s been almost two hours. Bronzaft may be antinoise, but she’s not the quiet type. She’s a talker.

She tells me the plot of her unpublished novel about an old lady killed by her loud neighbors. It’s called For Dying Out Loud.

“Did my novel have sex in it? Yes, it did. A lot. My daughter couldn’t read it. Did it depict noise? Yes. It had murder, it had mystery, but it didn’t have a novelist’s touch. I’m too academic.”

I interrupt Bronzaft to tell her that I have to pick up my kids from school. I say good-bye, catch the bus, and ride home trying to ignore the rumbles and squeaks of traffic.

Listening Carefully

That evening, I pledge to turn down the volume on my life. I start in my kids’ room. I dig out all their beeping, screeching, yammering electronic toys, and spend half an hour putting masking tape over the plastic speakers.

“What are you doing, Daddy?” asks Lucas.

“Just fixing the broken toys,” I half lie.

It was a smashing success, at least from my point of view. You can still hear “Chicken Dance Elmo” demand that we “flap our wings,” but he sounds like he’s submerged in a bathtub, which is what I’d really like to do to him.

Next up, ear protection. I ordered reusable orange silicone SilentEar earplugs at the Ear Plug Superstore. They worked for a week or so. But they kept dropping out of my ear canals, and I was leaving behind a wake of plugs wherever I traveled. So I shelled out for a pair of Bose noise-canceling headphones. They cost a stress-inducing three hundred dollars.

I try them out on a plane to Atlanta, where I’m going on a business trip. I slip them over my ears, click the power switch, and . . . well, the world didn’t go silent. I can still hear the dinging seat-belt sign. But the headphones do turn the volume down from a ten to a seven. Life takes on a sort of a dreamy, uterine feel.

In the next few weeks, I start to wear my headphones more and more. They’re on my head right now, these big silver-and-black earmuffs. I resemble a baggage handler on the tarmac at JFK.

I wear them while working, while picking up my sons from school, while brushing my teeth. People ask, “What are you listening to?” Just the lovely sounds of silence, I say.

Julie has taken to calling me Lionel Richie, because I look like I just walked out of the recording studio for “We Are the World.” At least I’m 95 percent sure that’s what she calls me. I tend to miss a word here or there, like a bad Skype connection to Ecuador. I’m usually able to cover it up with nods and smiles. Never underestimate the power of the nod and smile.

The headphones aren’t foolproof. I recently wore them to a playdate at my friend John’s apartment.

“Please take them off,” Julie said as we waited for the elevator.

“Why?”

“They’re dorky.”

“They’re the same as sunglasses. They’re protecting my ears. Sunglasses protect my eyes. Same idea. Blocking out harmful stimuli. Why are sunglasses cool and earphones dorky?”

“Please take them off.”

I acceded.

But this just spurs me to prove to Julie how perilously loud our lives are, so I order a decibel meter on the Internet. It looks like a rectal thermometer. I carry mine around everywhere, surreptitiously taking it out and testing the air whenever possible.

Here’s a sample of my findings. And remember, decibel levels above eighty-five—about the sound of a leaf blower—can cause permanent hearing loss.

Dave & Buster’s restaurant/video arcade in Times Square: 102 decibels

New York’s C-line subway entering the station: 110

Zane’s tantrum about missing the last five minutes of Bubble Guppies: 91

Julie in an argument about whether or not I misplaced her Time magazine: Unknown. Whenever I put the decibel meter near her mouth, she refuses to talk. As Werner Heisenberg knew, taking measurements can mess with reality.

Checkup: Month 3

Weight: 168

Push-ups till exhaustion: 34

Walks in the park: 8

Blood pressure: 115/75

According to a University of Manchester study, my headphones might make my food taste better. The study found that background noise dampens our taste buds, which is part of the reason most airline lasagna tastes like AstroTurf.

This finding is good, as I need more incentive to eat healthy food. I’m trying to eat right, but only succeeding in fits and starts.

I downloaded a list of superfoods from Dr. Oz’s website, and I go on nutritional binges. I’m on a mission to break my own record for the most superfoods eaten in one sitting. My record so far is eight. Yesterday, I spent half an hour making a lunch salad of mango (vitamin C helps prevent periodontal disease), fennel (anti-inflammatory), blueberries (antioxidants, of course), avocados (monounsaturated fat), pomegranate seeds (ellagic acid that preserves collagen in skin), dark chocolate shavings, ground kelp, and lentils (good source of zinc). I like this idea of competition as an incentive to healthy eating, even if it’s just a competition to break my own record. Maybe games are the way to change our habits. Perhaps the competitive eating circuit could substitute kale for Coney Island hot dogs.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to exercise every day, though I only manage about four times a week. To boost that number, I decided to buy a treadmill off Craigslist for three hundred dollars.

“Where are we going to fit it?” asked Julie.

“The bedroom?” I said.

She paused. “Normally I’m against big machinery in the apartment. But if it’ll help you get in shape . . .”

And it was helping for a while. I was running two or three miles at 5 mph almost every day. Then we got a call from our downstairs neighbor, Lloyd. Apparently, everyone on the entire fourth floor is in a tizzy. The pounding from my treadmill reverberates from one end of the building to the other. One neighbor wants to know why, every night, the paintings on his walls bounce.

If I were in Bronzaft’s novel, I’d be murdered in my sleep. I’ve had to abandon my treadmill. It sits in my bedroom, a silent reminder of a wasted three hundred dollars.

Back to the gym it is. I can’t say that I relish it, but I don’t dread it as much as I once did.

There are parts of the gym ritual I find comforting. I like nodding at my fellow regulars, such as the guy who reads the Talmud while on the stationary bike. Or the guy who does biceps curls and then thumps his chest like Tarzan. Or the guy whose workout getup—tube socks and a white headband—makes him look like he stepped out of the 1985 Jamie Lee Curtis movie Perfect.

And thank God for Tony. He’s supportive, always saying how much improvement I’m making, even if I’ve been stuck on the fifteen-pound biceps curls for three weeks. He’s an understanding mentor, and happy to give me tips on gym etiquette. “You can’t let the weights clank down,” he says. “It draws negative attention. People think you’re weak. On the other hand, if you do a lot of grunting and then clank, that’s okay. But you got to plan for it.”

So overall, I feel decent. Even good. Perhaps the best I’ve felt since high school.

But every time I start to edge toward smugness, I read something that stresses me out. The latest study that’s obsessing me: It might not matter if I’m exercising for an hour a day. If I’m sitting down for the other sixteen waking hours, I’m almost as unhealthy as ever.