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Is the silence of the Great Plains to blame for ‘prairie madness’?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- HeyLaughingBoy 4y agoI can believe this. I live on a small farm in the Midwest. When my mom (who lives in NYC) comes to visit, it often takes her a few days before she can sleep well because it's so quiet at night. Conversely, living on top of a hill, the wind absolutely screams in winter. After two or three days of constant howling wind, sometimes I feel like I'm going nuts.
- izzydata 4y agoSemi-related. I grew up in the midwest except I was in a soundproofed basement room with no windows and now I have rather severe misophonia to a lot of random sounds.
- whateveracct 4y agoWhy a soundproof basement with no windows?
- izzydata 4y agoWe had a big house with a big family, but still not enough real bedrooms for every kid to have their own. I wanted my own room so I took the only available room. I didn't think it was a problem at the time.
- corrral 4y ago> Conversely, living on top of a hill, the wind absolutely screams in winter. After two or three days of constant howling wind, sometimes I feel like I'm going nuts. Indeed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_(1928_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_(1928_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_(2018_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_(2018_film) Novel, film based on the novel (starring Lillian Gish!), and a much newer re-make.
- tclancy 4y agoOh man, we live on top of a relatively small hill, there just isn’t anything else taller near us until you get to the White Mountains. When the wind picks up for more than two or three days at a time, I want to puncture my eardrums.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hereforphone 4y agoWhen one moves to a new, "strange", and unknown environment, separating themselves from friends and family and way of life, depression can be very real. Plains or no plains.
- Fargoan 4y agoThis is the real answer to why were they experiencing this distress
- ternaryoperator 4y agoAnd especially when all means of communications with those friends and family took weeks.
- sammalloy 4y ago> The description of the Great Plains soundscape reminds Adrian KC Lee, an auditory brain scientist at the University of Washington who was not involved in Velez’s study, of sensory deprivation or being in an anechoic chamber—a room designed to stop echoes. In those cases, even the smallest sound, like the rustle of clothing or even your own heartbeat, can become impossible to ignore. As Lee pointed out, the human brain will naturally adapt to its environment, essentially turning up or down the volume to better distinguish what’s going on. This reminds me of a story, I believe it was told by Joseph Goldstein to Sam Harris (but I could be mistaken), about learning to meditate in noisy, urban environments. It makes me think this method and process could illustrate what the author is talking about. I live in a fairly quiet community. I’ve become aware of people in our community through mutual acquaintances, friends and family, who have trouble sleeping at night without the television on. From what I’ve read, this is a common problem with people who suffer from anxiety and depression. So I think prairie madness might have exacerbated already existing mental health conditions in a select group of people. On Reddit this week, there was a popular video posting of a little boy sleeping peacefully on a chair as a loud mariachi band plays near his ears. How is this even possible?
- noman-land 4y agoI fell asleep sitting on the floor leaned against a wall during a heavy metal show. I was completely sober. Sometimes when you're tired, you're tired.
- sammalloy 4y agoAre you able to fall asleep easily and deeply at home? I’m a light sleeper, and I’ve often felt like a cat when I sleep. The sound of a mouse would wake me into a running sprint. My mother is the same way, but my father is not, so we joke that I inherited it from my mom, which makes a lot of sense given that I take after her. I’m just wondering if these things contribute to our overall state of awareness and normal waking consciousness. More topical, I enjoy silence, likely as a result of being a light sleeper. So I think I would be mostly immune to prairie madness. It’s also possible that it’s spectrum related in terms of noise sensitivity. One of my first memories was freaking out at a Warriors game as a child because of the noise levels. Interestingly, the spectrum issues come from my father, so there’s a strange mix of genes at work.
- jollybean 4y agoThe quiet at night is the most wonderful thing. I think really it's isolation and 'quiet all the time' that gets people.
- trhway 4y agoMinor similarity - I grew up near sea, and i remember the first time when inside the country i walked up a hill with an old fortress, looked around and felt something unusual and just a bit disorienting - there were no sea anywhere, just plains of fields and forests stretching all the way to horizon in all directions.
- bluenose69 4y agoIn the rare times when I've not been within a few kilometres of the sea, I've had this same feeling of looking around, not being sure what was missing. Apparently other things can take the place, with the mind (or is it the spirit) accepting one thing as a replacement for another. Mountains come to mind. Lakes and rivers, too, plus geologic formations. People tell me that these sorts of things can take the place of the sea. But the prairie, the vast prairie? To me, at least, the challenge of adjusting to the prairie would require replacing something with nothing. I can see how people would theorize that moving to the prairie could break one's spirit. I'd love to hear how prairie folks feel when they move near the sea, or to a spot within sight of the mountains. Perhaps the anisotropy of view and mobility starts to gnaw at them.
- chemeril 4y agoI moved from the greatest of the plains to the mountains, having now lived in the southern and northern Rockies. Counterintuitively, my world became much much larger after discovering topography. With no large geographic reference point your experienced world becomes only what you can see to the horizon, often blocked by crops or a section treeline. 3-5 miles out, 8 if you find a hill. And, since it's all patchwork rural farmland, every place you go outside of this radius feels the same. You've seen it before; it's just a rearranging of the same stock roads, treelines, fields, fences, and farm equipment. Moving to the mountains ruined me for the plains. In a ten-minute walk I can observe a river valley unfold below me with my view uninterrupted until the next mountain group 40 miles away. Ten minutes in the opposite direction and I'm climbing to the top of the world. In the mountains there is always something new to see and another incredible nook to find just around the bend. The topography brings a sense of scale that constantly reminds me just how big and exciting the world actually is.
- smm11 4y agoShe ran calling Wildfire.
- culi 4y agoLiving near a highway I feel like the opposite reason would probably a more common cause of some sort of mental health crisis
- rootw0rm 4y agoso much this. I had a condo in Murrieta, CA a while back. Bedroom was on the second story, right next to Murrieta Hot Springs Rd. I never got used to all the crazy sounds coming from that road.
- microtherion 4y agoSpeaking of Great Plains, I found that, being Swiss, I tend to feel unsettled in regions where no mountains whatsoever are visible on the horizon. I'm not even much of a mountaineer, but it seems I need them around to get my bearings.
- giantrobot 4y agoAs a Californian I have the same problem. Just about anywhere you go here there's mountains or at least hills. Driving east from Denver on I70 is just a featureless flat plane. I've driven all over the Great Plains and it's just unsettling. There's an old joke that you can watch your dog run away for three days which is not that much of an exaggeration.
- wincy 4y agoAs a midwesterner, California feels to me as if the very earth itself is conspiring against me, saying “those people in the hills above, they’re richer and better than you, poor lowly scum”. It just unnerves me when I’m in California.
- astrange 4y agoThey're also the ones with all the wildfire and power outage risks though.
- giantrobot 4y agoOh, the hills are definitely saying that. Don't take it personally though, they say that to all of us.
- ngold 4y agoAs a Californian, I moved to Sacramento but it drove me crazy it was so flat.
- Archelaos 4y ago> There's an old joke that you can watch your dog run away for three days which is not that much of an exaggeration. We have a joke here about people who live in the flat northern coastal regions of Germany: They can see at breakfast who is visiting at lunch. -- But that is nothing compared to the people who live in the mountains in the south: They can see at breakfast who is visiting at supper.
- msrenee 4y agoI wouldn't call the Great Plains silent at all. The sounds are different from the forested East, but there's a lot more going on than wind. Newspapers have never been immune to taking common misunderstandings and sensationalizing them.
- chemeril 4y agoI was raised on the plains of the Eastern Dakotas. The summers were always noisy: crickets, cicadas, coyotes, prairie dogs, wind, plenty to fill the air. The winters were incredibly austere, sometimes incomprehensibly so to those who haven't experienced them. On particularly cold and windless days outdoors the silence is almost unbelievable. You hear your heartbeat, the snow underfoot crunches so loudly you cringe, and sounds travels so clearly and without interruption that a half-mile seems within arm's reach. It's absolutely surreal and can be very disorienting, almost like space compresses around you. It was hard enough to live there in the 90s. I can't imagine how isolating it'd have been on a claim.
- wrycoder 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giants_in_the_Earth_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giants_in_the_Earth_(novel)
- bkjelden 4y agoThis was required reading in my high school english class in South Dakota, 15 or so years ago.
- astrange 4y agoSounds like a good place for a recording studio. Meanwhile, I've been trying highly recommended headphones, and it turns out everyone loves open headphones with no sound isolation, but then I just hear cars outside, my fridge compressor running, computer fans…
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ryanmcbride 4y agoOpen headphones and sound isolating headphones are good for different things. I personally don't like closed back or sound isolating ones because I want to be able to hear what's going on around me.
- swayvil 4y agoThere's a "psychic noise" (for lack of a better term) in cities. Less so in smaller cities. Ramps down as you go further into wilderness. The contrast is shocking. I have seen little discussion of it so I'm guessing most of us don't perceive it. You might even call it woo. Nonetheless. I could see some people becoming acclimated to it. Unable to tolerate its absence even. Otoh, some rare weirdos might flourish in that wilderness peace.
- 0_____0 4y agoI think of this 'psychic' energy as being people's perceptual and effectual fields. Space that other humans can interact with. Growing up in a city, one expects the presence of multitudes of other fields. Being in the wilderness is a trip; it takes a long time for me to really believe I'm not in someone else's perceptual radius. It's hard to convince myself that I could yell at the top of my lungs and not cause alarm, even when in the middle of desert pan where I can see for miles in any direction.
- TimedToasts 4y agoI recently returned from a visit to NYC for the first time. While there, I tried to tell my partner about the overwhelming 'citiness' that NYC was exuding but of course I couldn't describe it well. Naturally she shook her head at me. The trip was five days but I was still keenly aware of it into the very last evening. I had difficulty sleeping due to my inability to shut out all the noise -- sirens, honking, the occasional bit of shouting. For reference - I was born, raised, and spent most of my adult life in very small Midwestern towns. We moved a lot when I was young and it wasn't long before I learned to feel the vibes of each different town.
- Fargoan 4y agoI live in Fargo. Grew up in Bottineau, ND. I've lived in other states (Minnesota, Washington, California, Australian Capital Territory) but have spent most of my life in ND. I never thought of this place as particularly silent. Sometimes the bugs are annoyingly loud at my parents house on the prairie outside of Bottineau. The wind is almost constant, so you'll hear trees blowing around in the places that have them. Coyotes at night. Squirrels chittering. Woodpeckers. I suppose maybe it's different in the middle of the state where there's nothing but prairie as far as the eye can see, but I doubt it
- drewcoo 4y agoIs it true that the great plains are so silent they'll drive you crazy? Or drive your neighbor into a murderous rampage? Yes. Now go back to California!
- JKCalhoun 4y agoReading the article kept reminding me of "Country Death Song" [1] by the Violent Femmes. (Am I showing my age again?) [1] https://youtu.be/aACATdZKHxc https://youtu.be/aACATdZKHxc
- throw0101a 4y ago> “An alarming amount of insanity occurs in the new prairie States [sic] among farmers and their wives,” wrote journalist Eugene Smalley in The Atlantic in 1893. Meta: I find it cool that The Atlantic was around at that time and reporting on current events, and that it's still kicking around: * https://www.theatlantic.com https://www.theatlantic.com Not many places can have "/magazine/archive/18xx/" it its URL.
- ThinkingGuy 4y agoHarper's Magazine was founded in 1850, 7 years before The Atlantic, and is also still around. Their entire archive is available on their website (to subscribers only).
- Archelaos 4y agoScientific American was first published in 1845. A different type of periodical, though.
- permo-w 4y agoin terms of old Western companies, it seems to be beer, tobacco and news that survives the longest. I believe Japan has much, much older restaurants and hotels, along with companies like Nintendo
- toomanybeersies 4y ago> along with companies like Nintendo The western equivalent would probably be Nokia, which was founded in 1865 as a paper manufacturer.
- julianeon 4y agoBut the problem is (from what I can tell): it wasn't silent. It was much louder than the woods you know. This would have been at a time when it was nothing but native plants. Which means it would have been teeming and crawling with native insects (note that native plants will support more insect life than non-native ones - because the non-native insects that evolved to live off the non-native plants, are missing). So it would have been noisy with insect life. Butterflies. Creepy crawlies. Spiders. Dragonflies. Gnats. And things I'd have a hard time finding a common name for, moving around. And then the native reptiles and snakes that eat them (remember, present at a higher density then because there was more of the food they like, and fewer people). And the birds that feed off them, also present in higher numbers because there were no humans, no domestic cats, and no habitat loss restricting their numbers. No non-native predators at all. Zero percent pesticides compared to what we have now, much more water (nothing having been dammed or redirected), no farming depleting nutrients in the soil, only 100% virgin high quality composted soil. And so forth. It would make considerable noise, all the additional living biomass all these ecosystem positive changes would support. It's pretty easy to confirm this yourself, if you go to a small nature preserve that's been restored with native plants during the summer, and just sit there and observe for 10-20 minutes. And that's only a weak imitation of the amount of biomass those prairies would've supported.
- badpun 4y agoMy favourite writer, Czesław Miłosz, remarked how rich the nature was in Lithuania during 1920ies and 30ies (back then, not much changed there since the middle ages), compared to him living in Berkeley later. He wrote that the instect life was particularly impressive and you could have a wall of your house covered by a scum-like layer of various insects. My grandmother, who lived back then in similar conditions, said the same - there could be so many instects that it looked as if the whole wall was moving.
- somenewaccount1 4y agoIt's also easy to prove you wrong. Just go to the desolate prairies their talking about where you won't find a tree for miles and the birds only fly overhead.
- wglb 4y agoTheories stretched beyond the breaking point. I am of the third generation living on the plains of Montana, 60 miles south of Alberta. No such issues are in my family history. If you spent most of your life in the maddening din of New York City and experienced quiet for the first time, perhaps you can’t handle it. For goodness sake this part of the land has been inhabited for tens of thousands of years.
- nightowl_games 4y agoWhen I head out to my father or father in laws (Saskatchewan) farm, I usually ponder the vast empty field for a while. One time when I was at my father in laws, I said "it's kinda eerie how quiet it is" and he told me a story. A Japanese man had been working at a nearby oil town and had befriended my father in law. He wanted to be left alone in a field to enjoy the quite so he took him to a spot and left him there for a few hours. When my father in law came back, the Japanese man was sobbing.
- Neil44 4y agoAbout 20 years ago I was on my own in the Gobi desert for a while and the silence is still the thing I remember most. It was odd and unexpected.