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Hi, I'm Jonny Dymond and from the BBC World Service, this is The Global Story.

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Hi, I'm Jonny Dymond and from the BBC World Service, this is The Global Story.

Listen. Listen.

The chances are you live in a city.

The chances are there's a lot more noise out there than you, a human being were really made for.

And the chances are, if you live in a noisy city or a noisy part of a city, or you're just exposed to noise quite a lot, that it's making your health worse.

It's degrading and could be shortening your life.

So listen. Listen to the not so silent killer.

With me today is James Gallagher, the BBC's health and science correspondent, who's been looking into the way that noise affects our health and our lives.

Hi, James. Hi, Jonny.

Let me start with you and noise and how you personally feel about it.

I mean, will you go to like a pub or a bar that's really noisy and do you feel oppressed?

Would you go to a gig, a concert, and spend an hour and a half with your ears being assaulted?

How do you feel?

No, I love going to a gig or a concert or spending a night out.

It's exciting.

You kind of like the atmosphere lifts you, doesn't it?

At the same time, I now have three children, so I love a little bit of quiet and actively seek a little bit of quiet time whenever I possibly can, because sometimes you do just feel overwhelmed by the noise of my children.

But at one point I used to live in Belfast and I lived quite close to the flight path for George Best Belfast City Airport, and you kind of think maybe I'll get used to this, and I'm not entirely sure.

I'm not entirely sure, having made this programme I ever did.

But you've, you've lived in high noise environments.

You've tolerated it. It's just been part of life.

It's how it's gone. Exactly.

Yeah. Let's talk about perhaps why you shouldn't. Give us a sort of broad introduction to the work that you've been on, looking at how noise affects us, and in particular, I guess, how noise affects our health.

I think you've said the most important thing there, Johnny.

That noise actually does affect our health.

And I think that's something that you might find it maybe irritating at times or disruptive or a little bit frustrating.

But the science definitely backs up the concept that it has a deeper impact on our human bodies than just something that maybe affects our hearing.

Because how many times have you heard of, to go back to your rock concert, the ageing rocker that's lost their hearing from playing too many loud gigs?

We're very familiar with it having that kind of impact on our ears, but something that might affect your heart risk, how your brain functions are deeper questions about human physiology that scientists are answering.

But I felt that maybe we as a general population weren't really kind of aware of.

It appears now to be one of the sort of modern ills.

And the comparison, which I guess might be drawn is with another modern ill that until relatively recently, no one spent an awful time thinking about.

And that's air pollution.

Is that a fair parallel?

I think that is a fair parallel, and largely because one of the major sources of both is traffic.

So traffic is probably one of the biggest sources of noise pollution and one of the biggest everyday sources of air pollution.

So those two very often go hand in hand.

And it's often ranked when you consider what are the environmental factors that could be damaging our health.

Largely speaking, researchers that do the number crunching on this to work out what is the impact on life expectancies and cardiovascular health, they tend to put, give or take air pollution and noise pollution in the same bracket in terms of the impact it's having on our health.

And I think it can be quite challenging to realise that because if we think of air pollution like that, that's like chemicals that are inside the air that we're breathing in, that then damages our body.

And that's conceptually that's really easy to understand.

The idea that a physical force actually like the compression of air rhythmically to create a sound that could cause that.

That's a very different thing to wrap your head around, isn't it, Johnny?

Let's go to Barcelona, to the Spanish city of Barcelona.

Yeah, sure.

One of us did. One of us didn't.

There public health officials actually studied or tried to study the impact of noise pollution and came up with numbers.

They came up with what they said were clear impacts on health and longevity, right?

Yeah. They did that, but just for one source of noise pollution.

So they were only looking at traffic noise.

And they came up with they thought that around 300 heart attacks per year could be attributed to noise in about 30 deaths per year, down to the noise of traffic in just one city in the world.

So we think of one source of noise pollution and one outcome in terms of health, looking at the cardiovascular system.

And is that about a cumulative amount of noise, or rather a certain amount of noise over a certain level, over a certain amount of time?

Yeah, absolutely. This isn't like a motorbike goes past you, goes vroom really loud and then you drop dead.

Sound effects later.

It's not that it's a more subtle thing that happens over time.

And how noise above a certain amount starts to cause changes in the body and those changes over time.

And we're probably talking decades here, but people live in busy cities for decades.

There are things that, over that length of time, start to cause the changes that increase your risk of having things like heart attacks and strokes.

And in a truly hellish send for you.

You actually went to Barcelona, you met people there, and you looked into their exposure to noise.

What did you find?

Who did you find?

Well, I met a lovely woman called Coco who lives in kind of like a historic part of Barcelona, where it's actually mostly pedestrianised.

So it's kind of traffic noise isn't the problem there, and it has this lovely sense of community there.

So I met Coco in her flat.

It's like this fourth floor apartment, and you could really immediately sense the community spirit of living there.

The draw of living there was huge.

But for Coco, the noise is the massive problem of living there, and is probably why she's going to leave and move out.

So we went out onto her balcony and it's, you know, I'm quite jealous because you open her balcony and there across the Barcelona skyline, you can see the Sagrada Familia, the gigantic unfinished cathedral in the city. Yeah.

And but immediately below you have this kind of, like, massive courtyard.

And in that courtyard there is a space for walking dogs.

That courtyard, there is also a public space.

So that community spirit, that's all there is also shared when people want to have birthday parties, but it's also a place that people will have concerts and where young people congregate to drink alcoholic beverages, which young people never do anywhere.

And so all that is like a different source of noise, not traffic noise, but kind of like the noise of human life and experience.

And that is what's just driving her to distraction.

She has incredibly high stress levels because she goes to work and then she never feels she can relax at home because she's always having to deal with the large amount of noise that's there.

I mean, she played me some audio clips that she recorded on her phone of what it's like. One of them people partying just outside in that communal area.

You could hear the glass in her windows vibrating to the sound of it, and that is impacting her health.

Coco said she'd been hospitalized twice with chest pains.

Because there will be people who think, you know, God, modern life. Everyone complains about everything now, but it is, there's a direct link between the chest pains that Coco has and the noise that she experiences?

Practically impossible when you take one individual person to make definitive statements like that.

From Coco's perception, she would say 100%.

She feels the physical change in her body when there is loud noise outside and it's upsetting her.

She's reacting to it in a palpable, physical way.

And she would say that that is contributing to the stress that is contributing to her ill health.

From a scientific point of view, you would say, if we studied tens of thousands of people, we could attribute so many heart attacks or strokes or whatever to that noise.

But it's very difficult to say in one individual that was the cause.

That's just how science is, Jonny.

Yeah, sure. So that's Barcelona.

But you also looked into Dhaka in Bangladesh.

Why Dhaka? Why Dhaka? Because it's one of the noisiest cities in the world.

Right. And it's changing rapidly because there's been massive population expansion in Dhaka.

And there were people living there who used to live in a relatively quiet part of the city that has now exploded and is incredibly noisy.

There's huge amounts of traffic, there's businesses there that weren't there 15, 20 years ago.

And so environments and neighborhoods have changed incredibly quickly over time.

Dhaka has this kind of problem of honking horns.

It's like it has this cacophonous soundtrack to the city, and that has come from the explosion in traffic and people beeping their way from one point to another.

And I was chatting to one person, I wasn't there, but I've chatted to some of the people who were in the report and they were saying that kind of like they can spend three hours in traffic and the whole time is honk, honk, honk.

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Yeah, the whole time.

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And there again, did you find heightened levels of what you might identify as noise related ill health?

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Has there been research on the situation in Dhaka, or was just Dhaka an example, an extraordinary example of a place where there was huge amounts of noise?

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We went to Dhaka because it is the noisiest place and when we were there, we met doctors who were seeing patients and they are saying that they are attributing noise as being part of the reason that their patients are coming in with ill health.

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And we definitely met many a person who is frustrated by the noise and the soundtrack of the city.

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Okay, so we've talked about two of the cities that you have looked at, Barcelona and Dhaka, very, very different places at different stages of development.

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What we haven't really discussed, I guess, is what is actually going on to our bodies as a result of noise.

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Yes. I took part in an experiment.

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So we got people to record the sounds from all over the world that we did for the program.

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And then we took them to a sound laboratory, and a scientist tested me as we played the sounds.

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So I had basically like a glorified watch, but it was able to detect my heart rate and how much my skin was perspiring and I would be measured while the different sounds were being played to me.

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So we got the the baseline of what was happening inside my body to figure out what normal James.

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Insert joke here, Jonny.

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Then I was playing lots of different sounds, and the one that really, really agitated me was the sound of Dhaka and the honking of the traffic.

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And you could see that my body was responding physiologically to that sound.

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And that logical reaction is a very good proxy for stress levels.

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Yeah. So that's how it all arcs round.

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So you saw that my heart rate goes up when that sound was being played and my skin started to perspire more.

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So I was more sweaty when we were playing those sounds.

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And that was in contrast to lots of other ones.

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So there was like one sound of children playing in a park, and it sounded all quite nice and soothing, and my heart rate came down and I was like, I keep on saying, perspiring.

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Sweating. You can tell I'm the health and science reporter.

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Just say sweating. You were sweating.

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I was less sweaty when we were doing that.

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So the only thing that was changing in that experiment was the sound that we were playing out of the speakers of volume to try to experience it differently.

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And the explanation for that is that there is different parts of your brain assess sound when it comes in.

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So your auditory cortex is the bit of your brain that is understanding what's going on now is recognizing sounds while we're having this conversation, converting it into, ah, this is language, this is speech.

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I can start to comprehend what James and Jonny are talking about.

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There's another bit called the amygdala, which is responsible for the emotional response to sound.

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So there'll be sounds that you find nice or upsetting or disturbing.

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And the amygdala has the ability to then for your body to react negatively, to sound.

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So if it triggers the negative response in your body that releases stress hormones throughout the rest of the body, and that can do things like that's how you connect with, for example, my increased heart rate.

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So it's like this cycle you have the sound.

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If your emotional centre of your brain doesn't like it, that triggers the stress response in the body.

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What sort of evolutionary chain is being followed there?

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If you can follow a chain by these sort of sounds, you don't like being triggering this response.

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Why is that happening?

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It's all part of the body's flight or flight response system, is the idea.

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So if you imagine that you were just having a nice picnic, and then suddenly a giant predator comes leaping out of the bushes, and the thing that you heard first was the sound of it crashing through the trees to come to you.

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Your body needs to respond to that sound because it is an early warning sign of something bad happening.

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And that's what activates.

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The stress response in the body is a great thing in an emergency.

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It's what gets the heart rate going, gets all that blood going to all of your muscles ready so that you can run if you need to.

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The difference is, our body is no longer responding to the sound of a tiger coming to get you.

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It's responding to the sound of traffic which we're exposed to all the time.

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And it's that sound, that constant activation of this stress response that is culminating in ill health.

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And that's because our bodies are simply not set up to be constantly under stress like that, constantly being told, you know.

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Something's coming. Something's coming.

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Here at the BBC, we have a passion for solutions based journalism.

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Is there a solution?

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Does taking time out from noise or would taking time out from noise, apart from just going off and opening a sweetshop and living in the countryside?

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But would time out help?

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I now know your retirement plans Jonny.

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Yeah, the rather difficult thing is a lot of this at the moment seems to be the responsibilities on you to find a little bit of quiet in your life, rather than any big picture solution.

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But I think, yes, the evidence would suggest that if you yourself can find moments to escape from the noise, particularly if you're finding it particularly disruptive, actually getting some quiet into your life on a daily basis.

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Tricky because you yourself have said people don't find it disruptive.

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They just sort of learn to live with it, don't they?

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Yeah, I think there are degrees of that though, and particularly night-time noise can be particularly challenging to deal with.

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You never get to switch off.

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This is something I learnt. Did you know your ears never turn off?

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Well I mean, I haven't seen a switch anywhere so I kind of presumed they were working.

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But like even when you're asleep your body is reacting.

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If there is traffic going past my house, even if it doesn't wake me up and I don't consciously respond to it, my ears are processing that sound.

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My amygdala is processing the emotional response to that sound and starting to activate that stress response.

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Some of the researchers that I spoke to, though, in terms of how do they manage it in their day to day lives, they do really simple things like sleep in the bedroom that's furthest away from the road.

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When I'm walking around, if I have the choice between walking down this busy road or this side street, that's actually just one street over, but it's just miraculously much quieter.

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I find that in a lot of cities you get the really busy road.

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And then there's the quiet ones just next to it.

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I walk down the quiet road, and they're just finding little moments where you can just not be in a noisy environment.

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Okay, so that is what individuals can do to try and reduce noise.

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A fair number of people will expect governments to do something in places where there is loads of noise.

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I mean, you're talking about Dhaka and Bangladesh.

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Do governments and city agencies recognize it?

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Are they trying to act on it?

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Yeah. So when we were doing the reporting from Bangladesh, absolutely.

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There are people there trying to do something about it.

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So I was chatting to Syeda Rizwan Hassan, who is effectively the environment Minister for the government there, and recognises that noise is damaging people's health and is trying to do something specifically about the honking noise in the city.

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They're doing a little bit of carrot and stick of can we encourage people and make people more aware of the noise and see that there's a benefit for them, but also enforcing it, because technically you're not allowed to honk in Bangladesh, even though everybody does.

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If the awareness stuff doesn't work, then there's a lot of chatter about how they can enforce it. Fascinating.

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Fascinating to hear where we are compared to air pollution.

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Fascinating to hear of all the different risks.

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James, thank you very much indeed.

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It's been brilliant to talk to you.

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Thank you. Thank you, Jonny.

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And thank you very much for watching.

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If you never want to miss an episode, just go to wherever you pick up your podcasts and subscribe.

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Subscribe so you see us and hear us whenever we come out and you can leave, of course.

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Comments on the show below.

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Thank you very much for watching.

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