The quietest place on earth is an anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis.

There are other rooms like this one in the world, but the one at Orfield Labs is supposedly the quietest on earth.

According to Scienceabc.com, "An anechoic room/chamber is a special chamber that completely absorbs sound and electromagnetic waves, therefore rendering the room unusually silent to a disturbingly high degree."

In an anechoic chamber, you can hear sounds usually imperceptible -- your heart beat, your lungs, saliva in your mouth, the rustling of your clothes. In an anechoic chamber you are the sounds.

For many, such silence is unnerving. Steven Orfield, the lab's founder, told Hearing Aid Know: "We challenge people to sit in the chamber in the dark – one person stayed in there for 45 minutes." In a video (below), one curious man did manage to stay in an anechoic chamber at BYU for an hour. Orfield went on to say, "How you orient yourself is through sounds you hear when you walk. In the anechnoic chamber, you don’t have any cues. You take away the perceptual cues that allow you to balance and manoeuvre. If you’re in there for half an hour, you have to be in a chair."

Most often, anechoic chambers are used to test company products to see how loud they are. Smithsonianmag.com also says that NASA has sent astronauts into the room to help them adapt to the silence of space.

Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis holds three Guinness World Records for Quietest Place on Earth 2005, Quietest Place on Earth 2013 and World's First Digital Recording Studio 2006.

Their website also has an unusual clarifying statement: "If your interest is in challenging the '45 minute record', there is NO Guinness World Record for time spent in the chamber, this has been incorrectly reported in many press stories around the world.your interest is in challenging the '45 minute record', there is NO Guinness World Record for time spent in the chamber, this has been incorrectly reported in many press stories around the world."

Watch the following video for one man's hour spent in an anechoic chamber at Brigham Young University in Utah.

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