[HN Gopher] Is the silence of the Great Plains to blame for 'pra...
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Is the silence of the Great Plains to blame for 'prairie madness'?
Author : ecliptik
Score : 33 points
Date : 2022-07-22 20:06 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.atlasobscura.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.atlasobscura.com)
| culi wrote:
| Living near a highway I feel like the opposite reason would
| probably a more common cause of some sort of mental health crisis
| [deleted]
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Semi-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 wrote:
| Why a soundproof basement with no windows?
| izzydata wrote:
| We 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 wrote:
| > 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_(1928_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.
| microtherion wrote:
| Speaking 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 wrote:
| As 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.
| jollybean wrote:
| The quiet at night is the most wonderful thing.
|
| I think really it's isolation and 'quiet all the time' that gets
| people.
| hereforphone wrote:
| When 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.
| msrenee wrote:
| I 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.
| trhway wrote:
| Minor 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 wrote:
| In 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| smm11 wrote:
| She ran calling Wildfire.
| sammalloy wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Are 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.
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