Hear

From endless traffic to nonstop construction, if you live in a busy city, the noise is inescapable. Research has meticulously analyzed 11 key factors to map out the noisiest corners of the United States. From the constant hum of commuter traffic, to population density, to proximity to airports, and construction noise, the study paints a vivid picture of how urban density transforms our environment — and often leaves our ears ringing.

The survey finds nothing beats the racket taking place in the loudest state in the country, New Jersey! New Jersey takes the title thanks to its 1,267 residents packed into every square mile and a mind-boggling 50,374 vehicles traversing every square mile of road each day. Nearly 14,567 flights annually add to the sonic assault.

To put Jersey’s noise level into context, researchers gave the state a noise score of 52.87. That was more than 10 points more than the number two state on the list, Massachusetts (41.31).

Rounding out the top five are Pennsylvania (3rd), Florida (4th), and the tiny state of Rhode Island (5th). At the opposite end of the noise spectrum, other states offer a reprieve from the urban cacophony. Specifically, Alaska ranked as the quietest state in the U.S. (8.02), followed by Minnesota (49th) and Montana (48th). With minimal population density and limited air traffic, these states provide a sanctuary of silence.

While the study provides a fascinating look at noise levels, it also raises important questions about the potential health impacts of constant urban sound. As cities continue to grow and infrastructure expands, the battle against noise pollution becomes increasingly critical.

You are in a coffee shop, meeting with a friend over steaming lattes. While you are talking, your conversation partner seems engaged: They hold your gaze, smile at the funny parts, and nod warmly. You think they are a good listener, and you are excited to see them again soon. However, were they really listening? If you probed their mind during the conversation, what were they actually attending to and thinking about? Were they really listening attentively, or just creating the impression of good listening?

According to one recent study, we our attention wanders about 25% of the time. The researchers concluded:

“Speakers consistently overestimated their conversation partners’ attentiveness—often believing their partners were listening when they were not. Our results suggest this overestimation is (at least partly) due to the largely indistinguishable behavior of inattentive and attentive listeners. It appears that people can (and do) divide their attention during conversation and successfully feign attentiveness.”

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Listening to others—paying attention. (2) Listening to God—how often does our mind wander in our prayer life? (3) God listening to us—he never fails to hear us.

Hidden acoustic wonders called “whispering walls” have awed listeners since ancient times. The field of “archaeo-acoustics” studies the way sound and archaeological sites interact. Cathedrals and capital domes have been noted for the way they capture and amplify sound. A whispering gallery is usually a circular, hemispherical, or elliptical enclosure, often beneath a dome or a vault, in which whispers can be heard clearly in other parts of the gallery.

A whispering gallery allows whispered communication from one part of the internal side of the circumference to another specific part. The sound is carried by waves, known as whispering-gallery waves, that travel around the circumference clinging to the walls. This effect has been discovered in the whispering gallery of St Paul's Cathedral in London, the Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol, and Grand Central Station in New York, among others.

When a visitor stands at one focus the sound waves carry the words so that others will be able to hear the whispers from the opposite side of the gallery. Even when the room is filled with many people talking, the whisper can be heard, but only by standing in exactly the right location, others in the room won’t hear the whisper at all.

Possible Preaching Angle:

It is possible to hear the slightest whisper spoken in a massive room filled with people, but only when you stand in just the right place. In the same way, in a noisy, bustling world, it is possible to hear the “whisper” of God (1 Kings 19:12), but only if we are standing in the right place of obedience, readiness, and quiet waiting.

Steve Burns wasn’t conventionally handsome when he first auditioned to become the host of the Nickelodeon children’s show Blue’s Clues, but his weird, manic energy set him apart. In particular, after Burns would ask a question, he would get very close to the camera and incline his ear to show he was listening. Burns said in a recent interview, “I'd love to say that I was just a forward-thinking and insightful, brilliant actor, but it had nothing to do with anything like that. It was just desperation.”

What really sealed the deal, though, is how the children responded to him – one child in particular. MTV Networks, Nickelodeon’s parent company at the time, set up a focus group with toddlers, the intended audience demographic. Employee Lisa Headley brought in her two-year-old daughter. "She kind of like went a little feral, you know, dancing and carrying on, jumping up and down," Headley said. Burns ended up being hired as the host, and clips of Headley’s daughter excitedly responding to Burns were used in promotional advertisements for the show.

But Steve Burns didn’t get to meet that little girl until many, many years later. She’s now a TikTok influencer that goes by the name Astraea Regina, and they happened to be in the same comic convention in Indiana. When a friend told her that Burns was there, she dropped everything to go meet him.

"I went over to him and then I explained to him the story and his face looked so shocked," Regina said.

"I kind of thought she was just saying, 'I used to watch you on TV,'" Burns said. "I was like, 'Oh, cool, thank you. You know, that's great.' She's like, 'No, dude, that was me. I was the one who got you. I was the one in that focus group.' And that was just mind-blowing."

The two shared a hug, which was captured on social media and got more than a million views between TikTok and Instagram.

When Regina was asked why that video resonated so much with her followers, she struck an appreciative tone:

I think it gave a lot of people some context that a child's love and a child's adoration, and a child's voice actually does mean something. And I think Steve wanted that type of story to really come through because that's what he wanted someone to know, that he was still listening.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Children need to know there are loving adults willing to listen. By modeling a posture of patient engagement, we model for them the love of God, which is always present and available.

If you are heading into Manhattan off the George Washington Bridge, you can't miss the cluster of four 32-story apartment buildings built right over the interstate. 300,000 cars go whizzing underneath the buildings each day. This makes the bridge the nation’s busiest crossing.

Built in 1964, the Apartments were to be a shining monument to efforts in easing New York's chronic housing shortage. But almost immediately, the development was controversial; people worried that the exhaust from the traffic might be a health hazard to the residents.

Researchers began going floor-to-floor, checking on the well-being of school children who lived in the Apartments. Something was definitely going on. The kids living on the lower floors had lower reading scores than the children who lived on the buildings' higher floors. In fact, it was a linear relationship: the lower the floor of the child's apartment, the lower their reading scores.

But wait—further research showed it wasn't the exhaust pollution. It was noise pollution. The children in the lower levels were exposed to exponentially more traffic noise. All day, everyday, the kids heard the endless honking of horns, the screeching of brakes, and the continuous roar of hundreds of thousands of engines zooming by. Kids learned to block out all the sounds of traffic so well that they pretty much started to block out everything (even the good "noise").

None of these kids had hearing problems: all the kids had hearing tests, and they sailed right through. Cornell professor Gary Evans said that the answer is as simple as this: "The kids began to tune the noise out." The kids became too good at blocking noise, they tuned out all noise, including speech.

Trying to remedy the situation, the school installed some sound-absorbent panels at the ceiling. The paneling only reduced the volume by 5 dB. It was still awfully loud. But it was enough of a difference that the following year's preschoolers outperformed their predecessors. Their teachers reported that the kids were speaking in more complete sentences. They understood more of what was being spoken to them, and they were better understood by others.

But even with this research, it took until 2004 for the managers of the apartments to take action and install noise-minimizing double-pane glass windows.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This could be used as a good reminder of how much "good" can get lost in today's cacophony of “noise” of TikTok, social media, commercials, text messages, phone notifications, and the noise surrounding everyday life. We scarcely have any quiet times to meditate on God’s Word and to pray, or have a quiet conversation with a good friend.

In the spring of 2000, a unique library was established in Copenhagen, Denmark. It's called the Menneskebiblioteket, which is Danish for, “The Human Library."

The library is, in the true sense of the word, a library of people. Readers can borrow human beings serving as open books and have conversations they would not normally have access to. Every human book from their bookshelf, represents a group in society that is often subjected to prejudice, stigmatization, or discrimination because of their lifestyle, diagnosis, belief, disability, social status, ethnic origin, and so on.

Instead of checking out a book, you can have a conversation with someone who will share their story of being deaf, blind, autistic, houseless, sexually abused, or bipolar. The mission of the Human Library? To break down stereotypes and prejudices by fostering dialogue. Yes, you can ask these human books questions!

Their motto: "Unjudge someone."

Possible Preaching Angle:

Isn't that what Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount? "Do not judge, or you too will be judged." Instead of focusing on the speck of sawdust in someone else's eye, Jesus told us to “take the plank out of our own eye” (Matt. 7:1-5).

Roni Bandini is an artist and computer coder in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Like a great many Argentinians, he hears a lot of reggaeton music (a blend of reggae, hip-hop, and Latin rhythms). But not always voluntarily, that is.

In a post on Medium that has since gone viral, Bandini explained that the neighbor he shares a wall with plays loud reggaeton often and at odd hours of the day and night. But rather than pounding on the wall or leaving a note, Bandini decided to find a technical solution.

Bandini was inspired by a universal TV remote-control called “TV-B-Gone” that reduces unwanted noise in bars and restaurants from televisions that no one is watching anymore. So, he put together a contraption that could do the same thing with reggaeton music.

He used a small Raspberry Pi computer and AI that he trained to recognized reggaeton music. He then installed the device near the wall to monitor his neighbor’s music. Finally, he 3D-printed a name on his device: the “Reggaeton-Be-Gone.”

Any time it detects any reggaeton music, it will overwhelm his neighbor’s Bluetooth receiver with packet requests. He said, "I understand that jamming a neighbor’s speaker might be illegal, but on the other hand listening to reggaeton every day at 9 AM should definitely be illegal.”

There are three lessons here. First, if you want to be a good neighbor to someone who shares a wall with you, be mindful of when or how often you play loud music. Second, creativity and technical ingenuity can solve so many more problems than we think possible. But a third hidden lesson remains – so much hassle can be avoided if you simply take the initiative to communicate directly. Because who knows? Maybe Bandini’s neighbor might have turned the music down if he’d simply asked.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Many small problems can be kept from growing into large problems by diplomatically discussing it with the people involved (Matt. 18:15-17). So much hassle can be avoided if you simply take the initiative to communicate directly.

Ashley Class was initially unconcerned when her oldest child complained about monsters in her room. Ashley said, “She was saying she heard monsters in her bedroom wall, but we'd been watching Monster's Inc. She was a little speech delayed, so when she tried explaining it, we thought she meant there were monsters in her closet." So, she and her husband downplayed her fears, in the hopes that it was just a phase.

“We told her, ‘Nobody is in that closet.’ We made jokes about fighting the monster. We gave her a spray bottle full of water that was her monster spray.” But after the little girl’s fear intensified into night terrors, Ashley and her husband began having second thoughts. So, the following month, when they noticed a few bees going into the attic of their 100-year-old farmhouse, they decided to call a pest control company.

The pest control people told her that she likely had honeybees in her attic, which means that they couldn’t just spray pesticides like they would for other insects. They assured her that the problem was likely minimal. But one beekeeper brought a thermal camera to conduct an infrared scan on the house, and was shocked at what he found.

Ashley said, “At first, I thought it was a body,” referring to the reddish glow behind one of the walls in her daughter’s bedroom. “I was like, ‘What is that?’ And he says he thinks it's a hive. He didn't even have his bee gear on yet, but he took a hammer and knocked into the wall. Bees came swarming out like a horror movie.” The beekeeper estimated that there were over 50,000 bees in the wall.

And Ashley had to go back to her daughter to “fess up.” “We told her, ‘We found the monsters, you were right.’ Then we introduced her to the beekeeper and she was like, ‘No, he's a monster hunter.’ So, she called him Mr. Monster Hunter for the rest of the day, which was awesome.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Children need adult guidance, but sometimes their innocence enables them to see the truths that adults miss. “From the lips of children and infants you, Lord, have called forth your praise?” (Ps. 8:2; Matt. 21:16).

In his autobiographical novel, Everything Sad is Untrue, Daniel Nayeri describes fleeing from Iran as a boy to escape persecution for his Christian faith. At one point, he asks the reader a question:

Would you rather have a God who listens or a god who speaks? Be careful of the answer … There are gods all over the world who just want you to express yourself. At their worst, the people who want a god who listens are self-centered. They just want to live in the land of “do as you please.” And the ones who want a god who speaks are cruel. They just want law and justice to crush everything …. Love is empty without justice. Justice is cruel without love. Oh, and in case it wasn’t obvious the answer is both. God should be both.

Time and again, Jesus proves to be a God who listens. People seek him out by the thousands—but he never refuses a conversation. The only time Jesus ever silences anyone, saying, quite literally, “Be quiet!” it’s a demon (Luke 4:35). Other than that, he’s willing to give anyone the time of day. Blind Bartimaeus shouts to him on a crowded road. While others scold him to keep quiet, Jesus beckons him over and gives Bartimaeus the floor. “What do you want me to do for you?” he asks …. Whatever the blind man had to say, Jesus was all ears.

He’s not just a sounding board, though. Jesus has something to say. Words are the very tools Jesus uses to bring forth his plans …. When his friend is dead and lying in his tomb and Jesus says, “Lazarus, come out!” and the dead man comes out …. In other words, when Jesus speaks things happen.

Jesus is a God who listens and a God who speaks, a God who simply enjoys talking with people. He doesn’t mind being inconvenienced. He’s willing to seek out those who differ with him …. because he is a God who knows, a God to whom all hearts are open and no secrets hid.

The fact that Jesus is the kind of God who wants to be in a personal relationship with us is remarkable compared to the false gods who either speak from on high or listen to us with blank stares .… The Christian faith reveals that we have more than just words, but the Word made flesh.

Actress Diane Kruger (National Treasure, In The Fade) was once offered a role that required her to play a young wife and mother, experiencing the loss of her husband and child. Since she hadn’t personally experienced such painful losses in her own life, Diane realized that the only way she could prepare herself for the important role, would be to connect with people and groups that were walking through extreme grief and similar experiences.

It is said that initially, she began to offer her own thoughts and responses with those who shared their stories in the groups she attended. However, she gradually realized that it would be far better for her to stop talking, and to start listening with empathy to their stories. That decision brought about a meaningful learning curve that helped her adapt to the role she had to play in the film.

Possible Preaching Angle:

In conversations, how often are we eager to air our thoughts and views without listening to the other person? The Bible however advises us to be careful of the words we speak, and about the importance of being willing to listen to others. James 1:19 says, “My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak.”

Ever get the feeling you're talking to a brick wall when trying to communicate with your teens? Well, a new study suggests there may be some science to it, after finding that teenagers' brains start tuning out their mothers' voices around the age of 13. Researchers said that this is because they no longer find it “uniquely rewarding,” and instead tune into unfamiliar voices more.

The study by the Stanford School of Medicine used MRI brain scans to give the first detailed neurobiological explanation for how teenagers begin to separate from their parents. It suggests that when your teenagers don't seem to hear you, it's not simply that they don't want to clean their room or finish their homework—their brains aren't registering your voice the way they did in pre-teenage years.

Lead study author Daniel Abrams said, “Just as an infant knows to tune into her mother's voice, an adolescent knows to tune into novel voices. As a teen, you don't know you're doing this. You're just being you: You've got your friends and new companions and you want to spend time with them. Your mind is increasingly sensitive to and attracted to these unfamiliar voices.”

Researchers said, “The brain's shift toward new voices is an aspect of healthy maturation. A child becomes independent at some point, and that has to be precipitated by an underlying biological signal. This signal helps teens engage with the world and form connections which allow them to be socially adept outside their families.”

A study published in 2016 showed that children can identify their mother's voice with extremely high accuracy. Even fetuses in utero can recognize their mother's voice before they're born. Yet with adolescents their brains are tuning away from their mother’s voice in favor of voices they've never even heard.

Brain responses to voices increased with teenagers' age. In fact, the relationship was so strong researchers could use the information in adolescents' brain scans to predict how old they were. When teens appear to be rebelling by not listening to their parents, it is because they are wired to pay more attention to voices outside their home.

Top athletes around the region convened in early February for the Cascade Classic, the Northwest Goalball Regional Tournament. If you’ve never seen the sport of goalball in action, you’re not alone. Most of its participants haven’t seen it, either. The Cascade Classic is held at the Washington State School for the Blind.

Eliana Mason, a two-time Paralympic goalball medalist said, “We always say goalball is the coolest sport you’ve never heard of. It’s for blind athletes, but you really have to see it for it to make sense.”

Goalball was invented by occupational therapists working with World War II vets who’d lost their sight in the war. It’s three-on-three, played on a volleyball-sized court, and the object is to roll a basketball-sized ball into an opponent’s goal. And everything about the experience is tailored to the needs of visually impaired people.

All participants wear black-out goggles, so everyone is equally sightless. The lines on the court are raised, making it possible for players to orient themselves. The ball itself has bells inside of it, so players can hear it as it moves around. And spectators are asked to maintain silence, to assist the players in their auditory navigation.

Tournament director Jen Armbruster said, “Instead of hand-eye coordination, it’s hand-ear coordination. Ambruster founded the tournament in 2010 at Portland State University. She said, “My big thing is just getting folks involved in physical activity, competitive or recreation. A lot of times, especially on the visually impaired and blind side, so many of them get pulled out of P.E. They don’t know the adaptations that are out there.”

Mason tried goalball and was never the same. “Jen took us to Florida for a youth tournament, and I fell in love with the sport after I got to compete and just be in the community. For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel like I had to compensate or work through a barrier. I could just be me.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

1) God is pleased when we make accommodations to include all the body of Christ in our activities. “We who are strong ought to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves. (Rom. 15:1); 2) We should all become experts at being silent and listening to hear God’s voice.

In 1801, at the age of 30, Ludwig van Beethoven complained about his diminishing hearing: “From a distance I do not hear the high notes of the instruments and the singers’ voices.”

Harvard professor Arthur C. Brooks notes that Beethoven “raged” against his decline. To be able to hear his own playing, he banged on pianos so forcefully that he often left them wrecked. By the age 45, he was completely deaf. He considered suicide but was held back only by the force of “moral rectitude.”

Cut off from the world of sound around him … at times he held a pencil in his mouth against his piano’s soundboard to feel the harmony of his chords. However, Beethoven produced the best music of his career, culminating in his incomparable Ninth Symphony, a composition so daringly new that it reinvented classical musical altogether.

Brooks wrote, “It seems a mystery that Beethoven became more original and brilliant as a composer in inverse proportion to his ability to hear. Deafness freed Beethoven as a composer because he no longer had society’s soundtrack in his ears.”

There are multiple lessons lurking in this tale. Most striking was the degree to which silence paradoxically allowed Beethoven to hear something new. In our current techno-cultural moment, we’re constantly connected to a humming, online, hive-mind of urgency. Sometimes, there’s long-term advantage in removing “society’s soundtrack” from our ears. As Beethoven so vividly demonstrates, we can’t really hear ourselves until we are able to turn down the volume on everyone else.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The same is true for the believer, you can’t really hear God until we turn down the deafening volume of the world. In his grace, God may take something from us in order to turn our attention fully to him.

Tim Keller writes:

Imagine an aging man whose hearing is failing but who is in denial about it. He usually complains that it is other people who are mumbling. But finally, his wife gets him to go get his hearing tested.

The clear verdict is that he needs hearing aids, but when he sees what they cost, he is taken aback. He says, “We can’t afford that.” But his wife counters and says, “Buy the best ones and consider it a gift from me.”

That sounds nice, but the man realizes that to accept this gift is to admit weakness. It would be like saying, “Thanks so much for this. Indeed, I am an aging man who can’t hear what people are telling me!”

Possible Preaching Angle:

There is no way to receive some gifts without admitting your need. The gospel is the ultimate gift that requires such a radical admission.

Rumors have been circulating that Mathew McConaughey might be considering a run for governor of Texas in 2022, and perhaps a higher office after that. In a recent interview in Men's Journal, Jesse Will cornered the Hollywood star on the topic. McConaughey, resisted confirming or denying his thoughts on the matter. But when pressed to give a hypothetical campaign slogan, he shared that his favorite suggestion has been, "Make America All Right, All Right, All Right, Again." Then he paused and said, "But for me . ..It’s ‘Meet Me in the Middle—I Dare You.'" He then explained:

When facing any crisis, I’ve found that a good plan is to first recognize the problem, then stabilize the situation, organize the response, then respond. You can’t have unity without confrontation. And to have confrontation, you have to at least validate the other’s position. We don’t even do that. So, I’d say, I’ll meet you in the middle. I dare you. It’s a challenge, a radical move. You come this way, I’ll come your way. That’s how democracy works.

In other words, to explain to another human why they are wrong (if in fact it is them and not us in error), we must listen to them. We must understand where they are coming from? Why do they make the choices they do? You must meet them in the middle.

The President of the U.S. has the power to push text messages to just about every smartphone in America, anytime he deems it necessary. Who knew? The Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) system was born of President Bush's frustration with the Federal Emergency Management Agency's response during Hurricane Katrina, and has morphed since. If you've ever received one of these alerts, it was probably about a missing child Amber alert or a severe weather warning.

But buried in the documents describing its function is this fact: The President of the United States can mass-message the entire phone-carrying nation at the same time whenever he deems it necessary. Oddly enough, if you do get a presidential emergency alert and you're on the phone, it won't show up until after you've finished your conversation. I guess the apocalypse can wait?

Preaching Angle: This illustrates the profound truth that God is in instantaneous and personal contact with every believer, at any time, under any circumstances, by his Spirit.

Doctors warn that a steady onslaught of loud noise, particularly through ear buds, is damaging the hearing of a generation wired for sound, although they may not realize it for years. More than 1 billion young people are at risk of hearing loss because of personal audio devices, such as smartphones, and damaging levels of sound at entertainment venues like electronic dance music festivals, where noise levels can top 120 decibels for hours, according to the World Health Organization.

"Probably the largest cause [of hearing damage] is millennials using earbuds and [smartphones]," says Dr. Sreekant Cherukuri, an ear, nose, and throat specialist. Hearing loss among today's teens is about 30 percent higher than in the 1980s and 1990s, Cherukuri estimates.

"You (once) had a Walkman with two AA batteries and headphones that went over your ears," he told NBC News. "At high volume, the sound was so distorted and the battery life was poor. Nowadays, we have smart phones that are extremely complex computers with high-level fidelity."

The damage happens when sound travels from the earbud deep inside your ear to the cochlea, where some 20,000 hair cells transmit the sound to the brain. But if the sound is too loud, and listened to for too long, it can damage those hair cells, or worse, cause them to die off. Permanent damage can happen in minutes, experts say.

Possible Preaching Angles: Physical hearing loss is a serious situation, but spiritual hearing loss is devastating. Will anyone in the wired generation be able to hear the voice of God amidst the constant barrage of noise?