--- title: 'What Happens to Your Body and Brain in an Anechoic Chamber?' source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=Sqt60LqaEBU' video_id: 'Sqt60LqaEBU' date: 2026-09-09 duration_sec: 534 channel: 'AsapSCIENCE' --- # What Happens to Your Body and Brain in an Anechoic Chamber? > Source: [What Happens to Your Body and Brain in an Anechoic Chamber?](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Sqt60LqaEBU) ## Summary The video introduces an anechoic chamber, a room designed to eliminate sound reflections and echo. The creator plans to spend hours alone in darkness inside it to observe effects on body and brain, after being invited by 3M to their innovation center and other facilities. ### Key Points - **Anechoic chamber purpose** [00:00] — The chamber is perfectly designed to remove sound reflections and echo. - **Planned experiment** [00:00] — The creator will spend hours alone in pure darkness inside the chamber to observe effects on body and brain. - **3M invitation** [00:15] — 3M invited the creator to visit their innovation center, anechoic chamber, and reverberation chamber (one of the loudest rooms). ## Transcript This is one of the quietest rooms in the world. Known as an anechoic chamber, it's perfectly designed to remove sound reflections and echo. And I'm about to go spend hours inside it alone in pure darkness to see what happens to my body and brain. I was invited by 3M to come visit their innovation center, as well as their anechoic chamber, as well as one of the loudest rooms in the world, their reverberation chamber. That shook my whole body. Of course, I jumped at the opportunity to potentially put myself through a torturous experience for the sake of science. I'm just feeling like I'm suffocating a little bit. After all, there's been rumors floating around that if you go in an anechoic chamber for long enough, you go crazy and lose your mind. We're going to see if I lose my mind. If I haven't already. When we got to the 3M testing center, we were met by Brian, who works in the lab. He first brought us into the reverberant chamber, which is basically the opposite of the anechoic chamber. Oh. My. God. And it's actually a secret. We're going to have to go back to the room. Wow. That actually looks so good. Here, the room is designed to perfectly reflect the sound, making it pretty intense and very loud. When the sound leaves the source, instead of being absorbed by the walls or other objects, Virtually all of the acoustic energy that hits the wall is reflected back into the room. A few extra reflectors are added into the room to keep distribution of sound even for the purposes of testing. If you're looking to do sound, sound here, microphone over there, and just find out all about it and watch. Time to pop the loop! And stop! To give you a sense of how muddled and reflected the sound can get, here's what happens as I walk away from the camera Finally the moment had come It was time to enter the anaconda chamber. Here we go. Okay. Whoa. Wow. It feels so weird. And it's way bigger than I thought it was going to be for some reason. What makes this room unique is it's a full end coat so you can see no floor. It's not fun because you look, you should be going down. It feels like you're flying. Am I coming over? Give it a try. That's so good. Okay. Oh! Okay, okay. No problem, right? Yep. Wow. So as you can see from the room, we have these fiberglass wedges placed strategically like this to absorb the sound as it comes in. And as that kinetic energy and the sound waves hit those wedges, those sound waves are transferred into heat. It's so weird. It's so weird. It's almost like I'm comfortable. Before locking myself in the room alone for hours, I wanted to do a couple tests to compare this room to the reverberation room. For fun, here's the direct comparison. I just took a little clap. I'm going to do a quick little test and walk backwards as I talk to see how the volume changes in my voice, because the amount of echo reaching the camera and the amount of audio and sound waves reaching it will change as I get further back, especially the fact that there is literally nothing to reverberate it and concentrate it to you. So, the level of audio, even though I've stayed the same, will probably feel quite different. So, they'll echo. Brian then locked me into the Malone to see how long I could survive. I honestly find it really peaceful. When I first came in here, I felt really disoriented. I'm also an anxious person, so it was just like going from a state of being that you're used to into a state that your brain isn used to processing like immediately let off my fight or flight But now when I sit in silence it feels really calming I was told to keep my phone on me because if I needed something they most definitely wouldn be able to hear me After all, the chamber is actually a room within a room, a cement cube within the building on top of the fiberglass paneling to keep as much sound from both entering or exiting the room. I wasn't going to hear anybody and they weren't going to hear me. After about 30 minutes of silence, I became extremely aware of my body. I can hear a little ringing in my ear, which kind of freaks me out. I just hear like... Literally, I can hear noises inside my head that are just like... While it felt like the pressure had increased in my ear, it was actually the opposite effect. In the real world, our ears are constantly hearing some sounds with pressure. In the anechoic room, the pressure is gone. So my ears were actually experiencing less pressure. It's definitely a different state of being to remove the sound, but you start to sort of acclimatize to it. I feel more physically in tune with what's happening to me. Other parts of my body, my attention on those parts is heightened. It's so weird. It's so crazy. I don't want to over-dramatize it because I want to be giving you a real experience. It's pretty subtle, but it's something that I haven't experienced before. By the hour mark, I was really in my head, but still sane. So I was dreading the lights about to go off. They're about to turn off the lights. And I'm actually afraid of the dark. As an adult, I am not ashamed to admit that. Actually, I am ashamed to admit that, but it's gonna be like, are there monsters? Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, actually. Oh my god, this is so scary. Standing was a mistake. Because I literally feel like I'm gonna fall over. I immediately had to sit down in order to avoid losing my balance completely. When people come, I've seen videos of people kind of like overly freaking out. I think it's just really peaceful. We use it a lot as a development tool. So as we're developing new products, we're trying to enhance new products, making them even better. The way to get peer information to make sure that we're not getting any distractions from any other sources that may be happening, is you come in here and you can really focus not only your products your attention and your equipment on what the actual problems are knowing your data is going to be very very good very solid and nothing interfering outside to affect those results I actually feel like I can hear things more in my head now that the lights are gone because it's all I can focus on. I don't even have a visual input now. I'm an adult who's actually afraid of the dark. Midway through sitting in utter darkness, I realized, this whole part of the video is gonna have literally no footage. So I turned my cell phone light on to get a Blair Witch style shot. Real cool, Mitch. I'm feeling like I'm suffocating a little bit. One hour and 44 minutes in, and I started to panic a little. I was no longer looking at the time so I could see what that felt like and later realized I was way off. But I am like, what if everyone just went home? I think they forgot me in here. I swear it's been longer than we agreed upon, but maybe my perception of time has changed, but it doesn't matter. That was crazy. Made it. That was really cool. It's pretty rare to just look and have your eyes wide open and see nothing and hear nothing. So there you have it. I did it back to survive. The world's quietest room did not go crazy, though that diagnosis is still up for debate. Brian also let me go under the chamber, which apparently only a handful of people on Earth have ever done. So that felt pretty cool. balloon acquired. Ultimately, it was a really fascinating experience, something that I have never felt before, and I want to thank 3M for bringing me out to their facilities. 3M is really a company that focuses on science and innovation, and their products are likely scattered through your home or hiding in plain sight around you on a daily basis, so it's been fun to explore the science behind some of that. They've actually created a series on TikTok and Instagram covering more awesome science behind their innovations that you can go check out on those platforms. All of it has actually blown my mind and I hope you find it as fascinating as I do. Otherwise, thank you so much for watching this video, make sure you like it and subscribe, and we'll see you next time for some more science. Peace!