@linguaphile: Like you, I consider ‘silence’ to mean little to no stimulation. In the example I gave above, the stimulation the receptionist was recommending was for me to look through a magazine. I can not experience silence, because I have tinnitus, so even underwater in the tub in a dark room, there is always sound. When we block out enough of the ambient noise, people with normal cochlear function can hear their breath and their pulse.
“It’s sad the people depend so much on their hearing that they miss a trillion other things…”
As an Audiologist, I find that people value their vision far more than their hearing. Because those who are born with normal hearing are exposed to sound in-utero, and since it is always there – even when we sleep at night – we generally take it for granted. Too few really comprehend how much sensory input our ears provide beyond conversational speech. Just as you are more in-tune with visual input than people who have hearing and vision, someone who is blind form birth could explain the myriad of sounds and all the information contained within it far better than I.
“Try hearing more than one city block away”
I currently am sitting on my deck outside our kitchen, and hearing an airplane fly overhead, the wind in the distance and getting closer until I finally feel it on my face, the roar of the highway behind me, the clanking in the auto-body shop that’s about a block away… Sound does travel very far, and we hear things beyond our line of sight. Hearing is “the eyes in the back of our head” because with normal binaural hearing, we have true surround sound. I just heard the floor creak inside the house, so even though I can’t see him, I know that my son just got out of his bed in the room above the kitchen. Now some birds are pitching a fit somewhere… it’s hard to tell because the wind is fairly steady, but I think it’s somewhere in front of the house.
When people who have essentially normal functioning for all senses are asked to hypothetically choose between vision or hearing, most say that they would rather be deaf than blind. I presume that is because being visually impaired does make a person more dependent for transportation and such. But once in a while you encounter those who would not be willing to give up music. There is no way to describe music to someone who has never heard, just as there is no way to describe colors to a person who has never seen.