Have you ever imagined being in a room where you could hear your blood pumping? In Minneapolis, Minnesota, there’s a room so quiet that most people can’t bear to sit in it for more than a few minutes. It’s the anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories, officially holding a Guinness World Record for being the quietest place on Earth.
On 19 November 2021, it was measured at an astonishing -24.9 decibels. That’s on the planet—and even more silent than most scientific equipment can measure.
“An anechoic chamber is a specially built room designed to absorb all sound and echoes,” explains Dr Deepti Sinha, Lead ENT Consultant at CK Birla Hospital, . “It helps researchers test devices or systems without any noise interfering.”
This chamber isn’t like any regular room. It’s built inside two thick steel and concrete layers—one inside the other. The outer walls are made of masonry and heavy steel. Inside, the smaller room sits on vibration-absorbing springs so that no sound can come in from outside. Every surface, including the floor, is covered in large wedge-shaped glass-fibre panels that trap sound waves and stop them bouncing back.
When you stand inside, you feel like you’re stepping into a vacuum. The floor is a suspended mesh grid, so the wedges line every surface—even beneath your feet.
The space isn’t vast—about the size of a small bedroom—but the silence feels endless.
Special equipment was needed to measure this extreme quiet. According to Guinness World Records, regular microphones couldn’t pick it up because even they make a small electrical hum.
While the chamber is designed for science—testing how quiet or loud certain products are—it has an odd effect on people. For many, it’s a profoundly uncomfortable experience.
“In this kind of silence, you start hearing sounds inside your body,” says Dr Sinha. “Your heartbeat becomes loud, you can hear your blood moving, your joints clicking, even your lungs expanding and contracting.”
Most people aren’t used to hearing themselves like this. Without any background noise to focus on, the brain starts tuning into internal sounds. This can make people feel dizzy, disoriented, or anxious. In some cases, it’s so intense that people report hearing things that aren’t there—mild hallucinations caused by sensory overload.
That’s why the current record for sitting inside this room is just 45 minutes. It might be completely quiet, but for most, it’s too quiet.
Despite how eerie it feels, this chamber has an essential purpose. It’s used in aerospace, telecommunications, and audio engineering, where equipment needs to be tested in total silence to ensure it works perfectly under extreme conditions.
“It’s beneficial for scientific testing,” says Dr Sinha. “But being in that kind of silence reminds us how much we rely on sound just to feel grounded.”
