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Making Sense of the Poster: The Symptoms and Side Effects of Force-Feeding Noise Into the Domestic Environment

The Symptoms and Side Effects poster is structured around four sets of variables that reflect how people are impacted along those four dimensions when noise is forcibly projected into their living quarters.

1. The impact on one's physical health and the functioning of one's body

2. The emotional impact

3. The impact on family relations in particular and interpersonal interactions in general

4. The impact on the individual's ability to perform and function effectively

The poster consists of an introduction, followed by three sections.

The first section is titled, The immediate effect of an externally generated in-home noise inundation.

Using the four variables listed above as a metric, the first section shows what happens to family members physically, emotionally, socially, and functionally, when their home is suddenly inundated with noise that is forcibly projected in from the outside.

When an in home noise bombardment reoccurs frequently, the victim's physical, functional, and psychological condition will begin to disintegrate under the acoustic onslaught. When that happens, the resulting loss of personal resilience can so sap the individual's capacity to cope with and adapt to external stressors that, after that, the same amount of noise will begin to impact him more severely, as a sensitivity to noise is fed and engendered. As a result, as his condition continues to deteriorate and his level of resilience further wanes, pronounced responses can also be expected to occur with lesser levels of force-fed noise.

While the first section of the poster shows what happens during an isolated or very occasional high intensity in-home noise inundation, the second section, titled, The impact of forcibly projecting noise into the home environment over time, describes what happens when the intrusive sound is delivered so persistently over time that it drives the human body beyond its capacity to adjust with equanimity, with a resulting deterioration along all four of the dimensions that are reflected by the chart.

It should be noted that the responses listed in the second section reflect the wide variability of the human reaction to over-exposure to noise. For example, over-exposure will cause some people to overeat while others will lose their appetites, and still others will find that their eating behavior is unaffected. Therefore, necessarily, some of the responses listed are contradictory, which makes it impossible for anyone to simultaneously experience all of the symptoms listed in the second section of the Symptoms and Side Effects chart.

High noise levels and high blood pressure tend to go together. In fact, researchers found that for every 10 decibel increase in the level of ambient sound, the systolic blood pressure of the exposed parties rose by an average of two millimeters of mercury. Accordingly, the third section of the poster lists the extreme injuries, known as end-organ damage, that can result after many years of living with high-blood pressure that was elevated by a noise-induced autonomic dysfunction.

Written by Craig Mixon, Ed.D. - Dog Science Network, Webmaster

To view the Symptoms and Side Effects of Noise poster

Click here for a coherent explanation of the mechanism whereby noise does its damage.

This page is part of the Noise Chart portion of Section Seven:
which is the Harm section of barkingdogs.net