The World’s Quietest Place!

can you stand the silence?! The longest anyone can bear Earth’s quietest place is 45 minutes.

The ‘anechoic chamber’ at Orfield Laboratories in South Minneapolis holds the Guinness World Record for the world’s quietest place. It’s 99.99 per cent sound absorbent and if you stay there too long you may start hallucinating. The longest that anyone has survived in it is just 45 minutes.

Steven Orfield, the company’s founder and president, explained that the room is so silent that whoever goes becomes the sound of the area. “When it’s quiet, ears will adapt. The quieter the room, the more things you hear. You’ll hear your heart beating, sometimes you can hear your lungs, hear your stomach gurgling loudly”, he adds.

Having a Facebook 'friend' request turned down - or even just ignored, hurts just as much as real-life rejection, claim psychologists

Being ignored or snubbed online leads people to feel 'numb', 'distanced' and 'withdrawn', researchers found. The finding suggests that for many of us, the internet is as 'real' a place as the real world.

'Most people would probably expect that being ignored or rejected via a remote source like the Internet would not hurt as much as being rejected in person. Yet, our studies show that people may experience similar psychological reactions to online exclusion as they do with face-to-face exclusion. ‘ said Joshua Smyth, professor of biobehavioral health and of medicine at Penn State.

However, the researchers caution that these findings may be related to the types of individuals who participated in their study.

‘These studies were conducted with college-aged students who have grown up with the Internet and other related technology, ‘ Filipkowski said. ‘These findings may not apply to individuals who have much less experience with technology and remote communication.'