Sitting in silence sometimes may sound incredible, but in one of the quietest anechoic chambers in the world, it will drive you insane. Orfield Laboratories in Minnesota has created one of the quietest rooms in the world. The sound is so quiet in that room it measures at negative decibels. In their anechoic chamber, the sound is measured at precisely -9.4 dBA. The room was founded by Steven Orfield, who told Hearing Aid Know, “We challenge people to sit in the chamber in the dark – one person stayed in there for 45 minutes. 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. In the anechoic chamber, you become the sound.” As of 2022, the new record is 2 hours spent in the chamber, but the room is not only for challengers to sit in; it is also used by many companies to test their products to see how loud they are. Sitting in a room like that for too long could cause you to start having hallucinations and a hard time getting up because the way we orient ourselves is through sound. Steven Orfield told Hearing Aid Know, “How you orient yourself is through sounds you hear when you walk. In the anechoic chamber, you don’t have any cues. 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.” The room was dubbed the quietest room in the world by “Guinness World Records”, in 2005, until it was beaten by Microsoft’s quietest room in the world in 2015.