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125 lines
7.2 KiB
Plaintext
125 lines
7.2 KiB
Plaintext
Episode: 2502
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Title: HPR2502: Volume Of Thought
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2502/hpr2502.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-19 04:15:36
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---
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This is HPR episode 2,500 and 2 entitled Volume on Thought.
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It is hosted by Lost in Drunks and in about 7 minutes long and carrying a clean flag.
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The summary is Lost in Drunks attempt to measure the volume of his own thoughts.
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This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
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Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
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That's HPR15.
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After web hosting, that's Honest in Fair at AnanasThost.com.
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Hello, this is Lost in Drunks and you'll have to forgive the sound quality I'm in the car right now as you can probably hear.
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But it shouldn't be too too bad, I hope, anyway.
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Today I wanted to talk about something that I noticed.
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It's just regarding myself and the way I hear and the way I think.
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Basically, we've all heard that term, something, something was so loud that I couldn't hear myself think.
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And I found that to be very true for myself.
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Now some people don't seem to have a problem with it.
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Any amount of noise can be going on and they have no problem concentrating whatsoever.
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But I don't have that capability, not really.
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If there's a lot of noise, especially a lot of distracting noise, not white noise or steady noise, like a loud machine in the background, almost anybody can work through that.
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But say a television is on or a stereo, music is blaring.
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And it can be so loud I literally can't keep my thoughts straight.
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And I got the thinking about that.
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What is the volume of my thoughts, my internal thought process?
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What volume is that?
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That a certain volume of external noise can upset it.
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So I did a little test.
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I put on my media player and I increased the volume of some music, bit by bit by bit, until I noticed that I couldn't keep my thoughts straight.
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They started getting jumbled and screwed up.
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And so for myself, it turns out that my internal volume is around negative 30 decibels.
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Now for people who work with audio, that's a concrete thing.
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For other people, it is not.
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So what that amounts to is that my internal dialogue, that is to say, when the volume of the music gets to about 30 minus 30 decibels, I can't think straight.
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It starts to get really screwed up.
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And that's, again, that's not steady noise, that's a jumble of noise.
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Jumble of, well, to me, it would be noise.
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It's stuff I don't want to hear, and it's interfering, right?
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Minus 30 decibels is where I'm thinking.
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And beyond that, I just can't keep a coherent thought.
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It's very difficult to concentrate.
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I make mistakes.
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I speak too loudly because I'm trying to hear myself think in my head.
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Now, there's probably been many, many tests done.
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Lots of, you know, lots of investigation about the internal volume of your thoughts.
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But I find that really interesting and a little strange.
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And I'm actually kind of interested to find out how other people react.
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Because, of course, the circumstances are always going to be different.
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I can take much louder orchestrated music, that is to say classical type music,
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than I can say rock, rock and roll.
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And I can take almost anything louder if there isn't a human voice involved.
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Because I guess there's just this natural wiring we have that if there's a voice,
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we tend to hear it.
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We tend to listen.
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But if there isn't a voice, it tends to be a lot easier.
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So that minus 30 thing comes with qualifiers.
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You know, in this case, in this particular situation,
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it was music with a voice, right?
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Now, I haven't done the same test exhaustively.
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I haven't done it with classical and then with just a rock instrumental
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and then with rock and roll music and then with polka music and then with blue grad.
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I haven't, you know, I haven't done that.
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And I strongly suspect that depending on what kind of music you enjoy,
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will make that very different.
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In this case, it was rock music with a voice.
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So I find that kind of fascinating in a way.
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You know, and again, I'm sure there have been tons of tests done,
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not only by scientists and such, but also by companies that, you know,
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put out things like headphones and all of that sort of thing.
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But this is the first I've really encountered it myself and measured it with anything
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besides someone making noise and irritating me.
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And I'm wondering if other people have noticed that.
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If there's a certain level where beyond that, they literally cannot think.
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Or perhaps there's a certain type of music.
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Maybe you hate it so much that even a small amount of it is distracting.
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Or maybe it's the opposite. Maybe you love it so much.
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A small amount of it is distracting.
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But for myself, something like music, like conversation, like chatter,
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like people laughing, people telling jokes or stories.
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If I'm trying to do something else while all of that is going on,
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there is a definite and it turns out to be a very hard limit to the volume I can deal with
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before I start getting confused.
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And I found that very interesting.
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And I thought perhaps I would just share that out.
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I would suspect that it's well worth some investigation,
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just some sort of citizen science in play where you test it out with some friends,
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where you put on a wide variety of different sounds, you know, different kinds of music
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than people just chattering as opposed to say an audience waiting before a show.
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That's almost like white noise.
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It's kind of a steady sort of thing that never really changes.
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And you can't really pick any one thing out over anything else.
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And that tends to fade in the background.
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And where does white noise play into all this?
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How high can that be before it's distracting?
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Does it have to be painful before it's distracting?
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And of course, it's whatever you're used to.
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If you happen to work maybe you're a roadie for a rock band,
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you're probably quite used to thinking straight while that music is playing,
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because you have a job to do and the music is going and you got to do it
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and you got to contact people and you got to talk to people.
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So I'm sure you can get used to almost anything,
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but this has been consistent throughout my life.
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I just never had a level where I could measure it, but now I do.
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At least with rock music.
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So anyway, that was just a little, little thought that I wanted to pass along.
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Thank you.
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And if you have any thoughts on this, please put them in the comments of this episode
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or better yet, maybe go and do that test.
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See what it does and then come back to HPR and do your own episode
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because you have thoughts, you have experiences, and we want to hear about them.
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You've been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio dot org.
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We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday, Monday through Friday.
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Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by an HPR listener like yourself.
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If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then click on our contributing
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to find out how easy it really is.
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Hacker Public Radio was founded by the digital dog pound
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and the infonomican computer club and is part of the binary revolution at binrev.com.
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If you have comments on today's show, please email the host directly,
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leave a comment on the website or record a follow-up episode yourself.
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Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under creative comments,
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attribution, share a life, 3.0 license.
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