Here is an excerpt from an interview of Justin Zorn and Leigh Marz by Kunal Modi for the McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey & Company. To read the complete article, check out others, learn more about the firm, and sign up for email alerts, please click here.
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Justin Zorn:Our new book is about the power of silence, as a source of mental clarity and physical health, and it offers solutions to challenges facing humanity—at a personal level, and as societies, communities, and the globe as a whole. The impetus for writing this book was a simple question: What are we going to do about this crazy world? How are we possibly going to be effective in helping to bring more sanity right now?We both had this intuition that the answers to the problems we’re facing might not all be solved with more thinking and talking; that there’s a necessity to turn down the noise and tune into silence.
Leigh Marz: That question and what it provoked led us to look beyond just auditory noise. We do look at auditory noise that we measure in decibels and think of often as happening to our ears, and maybe to our nervous systems when it’s really loud. Then we go further into informational noise: that which is grabbing our attention, which is increasing exponentially right now, while our ability to process that information is not increasing. Then we look at internal noise: that which happens in our consciousness, like rumination, worry, and anxiety, which are also on the rise in these times.Leigh Marz: The former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, estimates that the amount of information we’re creating is equal to that from the beginning of civilization to 2003, and that we’re creating that much information every day. There is an exponential amount of information in our surroundings that is grabbing for our attention, increasingly, with notifications, buzzing, whooshing, and pinging. That is increasing while our ability to process that information is not.
We are concerned about that informational noise, as well as the internal noise—that which is in our consciousness. A professor at University of Michigan, Ethan Kross, estimates that we listen to something like 320 State of the Union addresses every day in our brains. That compressed internal speech is going nonstop.
In your research, what surprised you most about how people think about silence?
Justin Zorn: In conversations with people about this meaning of the deepest silence they’ve ever known, we spoke, for example, to Tyson Yunkaporta, who’s an academic and also a member of an Aboriginal clan in Queensland, Australia. He told us that in his Indigenous language, there’s no such thing as silence.
There’s no word for silence because nature abhors a vacuum. There’s no such thing as the absolute absence of sound and stimulus, probably anywhere in the universe, but he said that you could describe the meaning of what we’re talking about as silence, as the ability to perceive a signal.
Leigh Marz: That’s one of those places we’re looking at silence as a starting place to discern the signal from the noise. It is a place for us to take stock of what is true and needing our attention—a signal—and what is noise—a distraction—distracting us from what we want to put our attention to.
How can we introduce elements of silence into our day-to-day lives?
Leigh Marz: That’s the time and space we’re most interested in: How do we integrate silence into our busy, noise-soaked lives, where we’re engaged in doing all the things we want to do? Justin and I both have families with young kids, and we’re involved in high stress work on climate and pollution and violence prevention. So we were interested in answering this question of how we weave silence into a busy, noise-soaked life.
How do we stay engaged in these questions, and in this time, while also finding silence? We’re looking at moments in the day when we can take mini breaks to connect to the deeper silence that helps us reach clarity and a place of discernment, as well as more rapturous moments—deeper moments of silence, where we can take a bigger pause and assess what we’re doing with this precious life of ours.
Justin Zorn: The core element of this is simply about appreciating silence in our lives. So many of us have meditated at one time or another. It’s a practice Leigh and I have both appreciated and gotten a lot out of in our lives. I had some experience teaching meditation on Capitol Hill, when I worked as a policy maker in [Washington,] DC, and Leigh has also had experience as a mindfulness teacher through her work with coalitions and leadership coaching.
We recognize that mindfulness isn’t for everyone. It’s not necessarily a cure-all solution to these destabilizing winds of modern mental hyperstimulation. Many people often think about mindfulness and meditation as a to-do, or even as a cudgel with which to beat themselves up, and say, “Why aren’t I meditating enough?” One of our core propositions is that the simple act of listening to silence, to the breeze, to the rain, even just to the ringing in our ears, can bring profound benefits to health and clarity. Researchers at Duke Medical School found that in mammalian brains, the act of listening to silence regenerates nerve cells. It regenerates neurons in the brain at a higher level than other forms of listening.
We talked, for example, to someone who worked as the White House correspondent for Time magazine for some time. And during her really high-stress life, she would come home and sit on the couch when she would get home after a busy day, and just listen. She didn’t have a meditation practice, per se, but she would listen to the ringing in her ears for about five minutes, and over time, that ringing in her ears would start to subside. It was almost like something residual from the stress in her day.
Without any kind of meditation practice, that act of listening to the silence was how she found her clarity, without any need for training or any kind of special rules and tools.
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Here is a direct link to the complete article.