Does a lot of background noise make study difficult? Sleep is essential to a public speaker. If this is a problem, try white noise. Do you have tinnitus and want to mask it? Want to enhance your privacy or improve sleep? Want to eliminate unwanted noise.
You can use noise to eliminate noise.
The right kind of noise might just help you deal with your challenges. By eliminating distracting noise, you can improve memory and mental processing. Yes, you can improve your peace of mind. The bad noise can be eliminate by something as simple as a CD or an inexpensive machine called white noise machines. White noise machines and CD’s can be purchased for all these applications.
The term white noise is analogous of white light which has all the colors of light. White noise contains a balance of all the audible sound frequencies.
How does it work?
Have you ever heard a large group of people talking at the same time? It could be described as everyone talking softly and saying, "walla walla walla." At a louder levels it sounds like a low roar.
If you took Psych 101 you probably remember the ability we have called differentiation. It means we can hear one person talking out of 100 by focusing our attention on them. If you don’t focus, it will sound like a lot of noise.
This is because of the wonderful way our brain works.
Test it for your self. Go to a pay phone on a busy street and make a call. Instead of putting your finger over your other ear, put it over the mouth piece as the person on the other end talks to you. They may think you have hung up so acknowledge them as they talk. Even though your hand is cupped over the phone they can still hear you acknowledge them.
You will find you can hear quite well. This is because of this ability of differentiation. We cannot discern one hundred voices coming in one ear as it does through the mouth piece on the phone. If you eliminate the extra noise coming through the mouth piece receiver, you will find you can hear a lot better.
So what if you take the concept of how our brain processes sounds and flood it with soothing sound or at least sounds that are not unpleasant. It makes it harder to hear or more importantly mentally process the other sounds. The result is peace for our mind.
This is where the memory enhancement benefit of the right noise can be seen.
Types of machines.
These have no volume control and usually only work in the room where they are placed. They may sound like a fan.
This includes electronic sound synthesizing machines as well as recordings. These provide the sounds of nature like the ocean, a babbling brook, even forest bird sounds. Check out reviews on the machines to get the ones that have a continuous synthesized sound rather than a recorded loop.
Recordings.Perhaps this is the least expensive way to get into white noise if you already have a stereo system. Numerous tapes and CD’s are available. Some even have nature sounds along with music.
If you are using white noise to sleep, the down side of CD and other recorded sounds are the changing tracks. This could interrupt sleep.
In a noisy world, fight noise with noise, the right noise that is, white noise.