It is possible for human beings to hear silence, according to a team of philosophers and psychologists, in a huge win for 1960s crooners Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. In a study published on Monday by Johns Hopkins University researchers, the team decided that it’s not just sound that human hears pick up: silence is, indeed, something we can hear too. Rui Zhe Goh, a Johns Hopkins graduate student in philosophy and psychology who was the study’s lead author, wrote: "We typically think of our sense of hearing as being concerned with sounds. But silence, whatever it is, is not a sound — it's the absence of sound. Surprisingly, what our work suggests is that nothing is also something you can hear.” Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Per the study, published in the journal PNAS, researchers had participants listen to an array of audio illusions. They also periodically substituted the noise for pure nothingness, the measure whether people’s brains would react in the same way. “Philosophers have long debated whether silence is something we can literally perceive, but there hasn’t been a scientific study aimed directly at this question,” said study co-author Chaz Firestone, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences and the director of the Johns Hopkins Perception & Mind Laboratory. “Our approach was to ask whether our brains treat silences the way they treat sounds.” "If you can get the same illusions with silences as you get with sounds, then that may be evidence that we literally hear silence after all." The 1,000 participants’ responses were measured across seven different tests. Across all of them, their brains reacted the same way to silence as they did to noise. “We show that silences can 'substitute' for sounds in event-based auditory illusions,” said the study. “Seven experiments introduce three 'silence illusions,' adapted from perceptual illusions previously thought to arise only with sounds.” “In all cases, silences elicited temporal distortions perfectly analogous to their sound-based counterparts, suggesting that auditory processing treats moments of silence the way it treats sounds. Silence is truly perceived, not merely inferred,” it said. “The kinds of illusions and effects that look like they are unique to the auditory processing of a sound, we also get them with silences, suggesting we really do hear absences of sound too,” added study co-author Ian Phillips, a John Hopkins philosopher and psychologist. Hello darkness my old friend… Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Apex Legends Season 18 ends on Sunday, Oct. 29, 2023, giving fans three months to permanently unlock Revenant Reborn and all the available limited-time cosmetics.

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Here are all available Animal Crossing amiibo cards.

If you've logged on to Twitter in the last year or so, you've probably seen the phrase "Space Karen" trending. Every now and then the phrase will trend, especially when Elon Musk does something people do not like. "Space Karen" is the insulting nickname people use to refer to Musk, 51. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter When Musk gave remaining Twitter employees an ultimatum to work harder or leave, activists projected the name "Space Karen" onto Twitter HQ. People used it against Musk again after he suspended several journalists' accounts who had been covering him from Twitter last year. Musk accused them of "doxxing" his private information. People have called out Musk for preaching that he wanted to make Twitter free-speech-oriented while censoring journalists who have covered him and his companies. The name "Karen" has become synonymous with middle-aged, white women who are exemplifying entitled behavior. Many felt Musk was suspending accounts on personal bias. Musk was bestowed his nickname in November 2020, after he tweeted questioning the validity of Covid-19 rapid tests. During the pandemic, those who questioned Covid-19, vaccines, or refused to comply with restrictions were often called Karen. "What's bogus is that Space Karen didn't read up on the test before complaining to his millions of followers," Dr Emily Bell wrote. Space Karen has become Twitter's method of calling out Musk for being entitled or exhibiting exclusive behaviors. Like when Musk made fun of people who declare their pronouns. And now people are using the nickname again, after Twitter applied a temporary limit to the number of tweets users can read in a day, with Musk saying the temporary limits were to address "extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation". So there you have it. Don't mess with the internet or the internet will come up with an unflattering nickname for you. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Chinese tech giant Alibaba said Tuesday it will replace its top boss in a surprise move at the e-commerce titan as it looks to recover from years of slow growth caused weak...

REDMOND, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 26, 2023--