The Quietest Place on Earth is so Disorienting, People Can’t Last More Than 55 Minutes

Complete and total silence is nearly impossible to find; in fact, it’s only available in one place on Earth. Here, the silence is so loud that people become completely disoriented, lose their balance, and even hallucinate. No one has ever lasted more than 55 minutes before begging to be let out.

There, a company called Orfield Laboratories built a completely silent anechoic chamber that is so quiet, those inside literally lose their minds in just 30 minutes.

The actual design of the room is exceptionally complex. It’s made of 3.3ft-thick fiberglass acoustic wedges and double walls of insulated steel and concrete, which eliminate 99.99% of all sound.

When inside the chamber, a person can legitimately hear their bones moving and their blood flowing. As Steven Orfield explained, “You’ll hear your heart beating; sometimes you can hear your lungs, hear your stomach gurgling loudly.”

This unimaginable silence also leads to several body and mind reactions that completely disorient everyone who spends time in the chamber.

He said, “How you orient yourself is through sounds you hear when you walk. You take away the perceptual cues that allow you to balance and maneuver. If you’re in there for half an hour, you have to be in a chair.”

While each person reports different kinds of hallucinations, it’s often compared to the experience of taking psychedelic drugs, where sometimes, the visions and feelings are beautiful and inspiring, and other times, they are quite terrifying.

The company 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.”

According to Orfield, the longest a person has ever lasted inside is a mere 55 minutes. While he and other researchers are certainly curious as to what would happen to someone after an hour, they won’t know until they find someone who can actually do it.

Orfield wrote on the company’s website, “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.

While it does cost $600 an hour, and you may only last a half hour, some say that the experience is like nothing they’ve ever felt before.

As Orfield explained, the chamber absolutely provides “therapeutic and spiritual effects” that could drastically improve one’s mental wellness.