Noise

[JuniperEccles]

People who move to live near a railway line or a main road say that they don't hear the noise after a while. The noise is still there so why is this?

[scooping]

Don't know but used to live under a flight path and after a few weeks didn't register the noise at all.

[albaqwerty]

I have no evidence to provide, but I think the brain tunes out the noise as the brain has decided it's not important.

Some relatives used to have a railway line close to them and after a couple of days staying with them, never heard/noticed the trains.

I live near an airport, when I've heard the first plane, either take off or come into land, I don't hear most of them for the rest of the day.

[Sqad]

I don't know the answer to this, but there are 2 main theories:
1) Adaptation. the nerves to the brain via the inner ear adapt to the noise and it becomes less noticeable......like smell, living close to a pig farm.
2) The second is called "selectivity"the brain receives all the noises, but only selects the important ones to act upon. Constant innocent well known noises tend to be ignored.

This is a gross simplification.

[Zacs-Master]

https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/scicurious/how-brains-filter-signal-noise

[scooping]

Interesting stuff.

[woofgang]

I have got three chiming clocks and cuckoo clock. My sister visits and calls it bedlam and I don’t notice.

[Old_Geezer]

The brain filters it out as not being relevant.
Take away the noise and it's absence is noticed instead.

[Sqad]

The simple answer may well be in the cases that you state, that the constant noise has "damaged" the inner ears and this is well seen in workers exposed to noise........called Noise Induced Hearing Loss for which one can apply and receive compensation.
OK, that is slightly different.

[Khandro]

My house is less than 100 m. from the village (Catholic) church, there are only 360 people live in the village and yet the clock on the onion domed clock tower rings every quarter of an hour, 24/7 plus a 2 minute angelus at 6:00am and 7:00pm and yet I never "hear" it and always have to look at my watch to know what time it is.

[JuniperEccles]

They're all interesting theories. Many thanks.

[woofgang]

I know mine isn’t hearing loss as I recently had a hearing test

[Sqad]

Woofgang......the chimes of the cuckoo clock and others tend to be high tones and you may have lost those high tones. You think that your hearing is normal because the speech frequencies are unaffected and hence you feel that your hearing is normal.
You haven't said where you had your hearing test and what the result was, other than it was normal.

[Arrods]

Good point O_G. When the air con used to go off in our office, the 'silence' was deafening.

[bookbinder]

I once visited Niagara, and the people who lived there said that they didn't notice the noise of the falls.