In a world filled with ugly sights and sounds we first see events before we hear them. Light travels faster than sound at roughly 300,000 metres per second, making sight practically instantaneous. Sound lags behind at a much slower pace, at around 340 metres per second — our eyes arrive long before our ears reach us. By then, we had already made decisions, usually wrong ones.
In a recent article by Nuala G Walsh in Psychology Today, it is a gross misjudgement to trust what we see rather than what we hear. We are programmed to believe that “seeing is believing,” jumping to conclusions based on our visual images. That is a hazard that can directly reduce or damage our decisions in communication, as appearances are often deceiving.
Despite seeing faster, we hear more emotion than we see. While light is faster, the brain actually processes sound faster than sight. On average, humans react to sound roughly 20-100 times than they do sight, therefore sound signals have a shorter distance to travel, to trigger a response.
Hearing acts as our primary alarm system, unlike vision which is limited to images in front of you — hearing works through walls and halls, around corners, and even while you sleep. Your ears never close. Consider the blind. Even in total darkness your brain uses audio cues to visualise and map the world around you — “better heard than seen”.
The edition of Psychology Today notes a sensory danger. In the aftermath of terrible events, the more painful or shocking, the more it requires us to listen first, speak last.
In this age of screens, smartphones, and voice speakers, we experience a sensory overload of loud and distasteful sights and sounds. The most frightening is that we have stopped noticing.
If the 20th century was defined by the smog of industry, the 21st century is defined by “a psychic smog” — a relentless, digital and physical tide of inaesthetic litter — the era of sensory pollution.
We talk of the smog in our air, but rarely about the toxins in our information.
Louder than ever is our world, with increasing evidence that noise pollution is the second-largest environmental cause of health problems, after air pollution. Not the least of our health threats is the “noise” of political rhetoric by their deceptive politicians. In a span of a 24-hour news media, we receive a barrage of misinformation to drown out meaningful talk by meaningless noise. And after all the talk, what do we know? What is the situation of the war in Iran? Is there a ceasefire? A truce? An active war? Negotiations? Who is winning?
Is Project Epic Fury furious? Essentially a chaotic, noisy, ultimately meaningless performance. If you are in a Shakespeare mood you could say “Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”, or should we spare you — much ado about nothing.
At best a fragile stalemate as the world suffers economically and emotionally.
A mosaic of chaotic sights and sounds fills our space and invades our headspace. From literal noise to semantic noise of lies and propaganda, we are left to rot by our “auditory rot” as they announce “all is well.”
The great danger is in believing a “convenient lie” which can make you feel like the truth, even if you know it’s false.
Science calls it “the illusory truth effect”, a psychological phenomenon when our brains start to mistake repetition for reality. Research shows that a single source repeating a claim over and over can be just as persuasive as hearing it from many different people. Loud authority figures (and we know them) can have massive impact. We “give up”, we believe the lie just to make the noise stop.
For most of human history, “slaying in the group” was more important for survival than being factually right. Penalties against the “group” or “party” are far more dangerous than simply being wrong.
A glaring example is that universities in the US that do not align with political demands have frozen funding by the Department of Education.
This is the sensory pollution of our era — a relentless broadcast of political static.
The result is a deafness that comes from a constant exposure when a lie is shouted often enough. It stops sounding like a claim, starts sounding like today’s weather. The weather will never hurt you as much as malicious, pernicious lies. When leaders lie consistently, it is not merely moral outrage on a bad day. It devastates nations every day. The result is genocide.
“The first casualty of war is truth”. But truth isn’t just a casualty, it’s often the target.
The loss of harmony in our world is twofold — not only are we unable to coexist, we can literally affect our hearing, under the overload of noise and conflict.
As of 2025, WHO finds 2.5 billion people have some degree of hearing loss.
Perhaps the answer is a refuge from the absence of sound. “Silence is not the absence of something, but the presence of everything.”
Research from 2013 showed that two hours of silence per day can stimulate the growth of new cells in the hippocampus — the area of the brain responsible for learning and memory. A mere two minutes of silence can be more calming than relaxing music, lowers blood pressure, and boosts resilience against anxiety.
“If speech is silver, silence is gold.” If they only knew.
“Be silent or say something better than silence. Words should surpass its value.”
Pythagoras (BC 570-490)
* A version of this article appears in print in the 7 May, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
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