Shhhhhh! Somebody around you might be thinking. Or creating. Or healing.
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Quiet in today’s world may seem impossible. But despite pressures in the workplace and in social circles to collaborate, speak up, step forward — do practically anything to be seen and heard — the value and need for quiet is increasingly being emphasized by everyone, from authors to artists.
A best-selling book by Susan Cain, “Quiet, The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking,” has launched a conversation on why our culture puts so much stock in people who are aggressive and loud when about half of the population is considered to be the opposite.
“We are in the early stages of a Quiet Revolution, analogous to the early stages of the women’s movement,” Cain wrote via email while vacationing in Hawaii. “Change will come slowly, but change will come everywhere.”
She says high schools from California to Baltimore are considering whether to change policies tying grades to class participation; the Wharton School of business at the University of Pennsylvania has started a quiet leaders club; Steelcase, a leading provider of office furniture, is rethinking the open office plan in favor of more individualized work spaces.
And a Harvard University professor, Helen Vendler, who served on an admissions committee, asked her colleagues if there was room for future poets, novelists and screenwriters who aren’t straight-A students and who value introspection above extroversion. She said in an essay, “… such unusual students may be, in the long run, the graduates of whom we will be most proud.”
In a different environment, hospitals nationwide are being rated by patients on noise levels, and their Medicare reimbursement relies, in part, on good scores. Noise is linked to stress, medical errors and disruption of sleep, while restfulness promotes quicker healing and fewer return visits.
Argentinian artist Amalia Pica, whose works recently were on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, lived through the stifling of speech for political reasons while growing up and now focuses her work on communication. She explores listening as more imperative than talking, curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm says.
And even a local teen seized the platform of her graduation speech to extol the importance of quiet for self-reflection. The topic grew out of Ashwini Reddy’s realization that she’d squandered the state-mandated 15 seconds for contemplation each morning at Barrington High School.
“For most of the time I thought these were awkward, and I’d finish homework or text friends,” said Reddy, of Hoffman Estates. “But then I realized if we had used the time, it could have shaped us to be different people.”
There’s long been tension between activity and solitude, noise and quiet, said Gary Fine, a professor of sociology at Northwestern University. The tension is within an individual and between individuals and their environment.
“Noise can be energizing, where the action is, part of discourse,” said Fine, who spent a month this summer in a North Carolina cabin to finish a book on competitive chess, “as opposed to being off in Walden Pond. (Henry David) Thoreau was at one end of the sound dimension,” as he sought isolation to write, “while someone who is boisterous is at the other.”
Cain argues that we have created an extrovert ideal in which teachers praise students who raise their hands, bosses reward those who speak at meetings, and the edge at networking events goes to glad-handers. All this leaves little room for introverts, whose contributions can be overlooked and undervalued, she says.
“Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we’ve turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform,” Cain writes. “If you’re an introvert,” and she counts herself among them, “you know the bias against quiet can cause deep psychic pain. Parents apologize for your shyness. You’re prodded to come out of your shell. You’re told you’re in your head too much.”
She says that without introverts, we would not have the theory of gravity or relativity; there would be no “ET,” “The Cat in the Hat” or Harry Potter. And social injustice might have languished longer had Rosa Parks not been stubborn on the bus home one day.
“A formidable orator (Martin Luther King Jr.) refusing to give up his seat on a segregated bus wouldn’t have had the same effect as a modest woman who’d clearly prefer to keep silent, but for the exigencies of the situation,” Cain writes.
As an artist, Pica is interested in the basic human need to be heard and the exchanges between listeners and talkers, Widholm says. The artist, who could not be reached because she was visiting family in a remote part of Argentina, said in the exhibition catalog that, “I became interested in the one who listens as the subject that makes thought possible. … It is by saying something to someone else who is listening that one thinks of what to say, and the thought might never have existed otherwise.”
Pica’s work demonstrates what Widholm sees as “a surplus of information that starts to feel like noise, like static. We need to slow down, to have quiet to focus. Quiet suggests a moment of potential … a moment of thinking about what to say.”
In “Babble, Blabber, Chatter, Gibber, Jabber, Patter, Prattle, Rattle, Yammer, Yada, yada, yada,” Pica was photographed waving semaphore flags, a maritime means of communication. She was in the desert, a clear disconnect, Widholm says, plus she was spelling out the long title in the unfamiliar code, rendering the message nonsensical, a kind of white noise.
“You don’t know what she’s saying. There’s too much noise, too much talking,” the curator says.
The noise that annoys hospital patients comes from creaky carts, alarms on various monitors, pages over intercoms and frequent medical interruptions. Long a lament, the lack of rest now is being taken more seriously, according to a 2010 survey by the Center for Health Design.
“Noise reduction in hospitals has taken on a new and growing importance and urgency. Pay for performance and quality transparency, along with a genuine desire to create a more generative environment for patient recovery, have become the catalysts for a much desired change … toward quietness,” the report says.
Pay for performance stems from implementation of Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems initiative, based on surveys of patients about their experiences in hospitals. The impetus was ever-rising costs, which Medicare hopes to help curtail by not paying for medical mistakes and inferior care.
Gary Madaras, an architect and acoustics expert who runs the Chicago-based Making Hospitals Quiet service, said 70 percent of a hospital’s score from the survey is based on patient outcomes and the rest on patient experience and satisfaction.
“It’s how (Medicare) finds out which ones are low quality and incentivizes them to improve,” Madaras said.
Solutions can range from regularly replacing monitor batteries and leads on patients to cut down on false-positives from alarms, to stopping pages, to setting aside a couple of hours a day as quiet time when lights are dimmed, medical procedures are limited, and visitors are restricted, he said.
“Improving sound quality reduces patient complaints, helps scores and contributes to better outcomes and patient recovery,” he said.
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To Reddy, who confesses to feeling “pathetic” at times because of a dependence on earbuds that she’s trying to curb, quiet is also qualitative but often tilted pejoratively toward those who are shy or introverted.
“People associate those who are quiet with negative things,” she said, recalling an exercise in a high school psychology class where extroversion was a positive trait.
“In class, I prefer to take everything in and not speak unless I have something to say that’s meaningful,” said Reddy, acknowledging that although some teachers base grades on participation, she wasn’t hurt by the practice.
“I’ve often been described as a casual philosopher, always the type of person to reflect. I think on walks with the dog: ‘Where am I? Where do I want to be?'” she said.
The goal of her graduation speech, for which she auditioned because Barrington High School has no valedictorian to speak at the ceremony, was to get her fellow students to think how they can incorporate quiet into their lives, she said.
“We need to take time to reflect on where we’re going, so we don’t look back in five years and just say how it passed so quickly,” said Reddy, who plans to study biochemistry and psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago this fall.
Cain advocates restorative niches where people can be themselves, since they often have to “act out of character for the sake of work or people we love,” she said in the email.
Individuals must find these respites, but they’re more effective if socially sanctioned, she says.
“Does your employer provide nap rooms or meditation rooms where you can go for peace and quiet? Do you feel free to take a head-clearing walk or does this feel like stolen time? Do company leaders model this behavior themselves or do they encourage a constantly pumped-up persona?” Cain wrote.
She believes enough in the power of quiet that she and a business partner are launching a company “dedicated to helping companies and individuals harness the strengths of introverts in business and their personal lives.”
The partners are opposites, she says. “This is no accident. We complement each other, and our young organization is the stronger for it.”