Is Noise Canceling Bad for Us?

There’s emerging evidence that the technology might be altering how we hear. I've stopped using it—and maybe you should too.

One of the more compelling examples of how commonly held wisdom can quickly evolve is the original Food Pyramid, which was introduced by the USDA in 1992. Throughout my childhood the pyramid was presented as an idealized visualization of nutrition—one that didn’t distinguish between the profiles of different carbohydrates, to say nothing of healthy fats—and that required, at a minimum, eating 6 to 11 daily servings of bread and grains. An impossible feat, even if you’re French. 

How the Food Pyramid came to be, well, that’s a whole other racket. (It’s almost as if the Department of Agriculture were somehow under the boot heels of a powerful industrialized farming lobby. ) The concept of 6 to 11 breads is a hilarious artifact of the ’90 that illustrates how widely accepted facts, especially in the world of consumer health, are susceptible to forces designed to make us spend more at the grocery store. 

The USDA’s original Food Pyramid from 1992.

So, in a non-conspiratorial way, I find 6 to 11 breads a useful and memorable framework for thinking through ideas and technologies in contemporary culture that we’ll look back at with regret, like screen time (Cal Newport famously said we’ll look back at our smartphones the way we do cigarettes) or vaping. One of those technologies, I suspect, will end up being the casual use of noise canceling, which probably isn’t as insidious to our health as 11 Costco croissants a day (sacre bleu) but likely isn’t doing our nervous system any favors. 

I used to deploy noise canceling sparingly, mostly in an open office. But last month, when a firmware update for Active Noise Canceling on my AirPods was rolled out, I decided to give the feature a shot during my subway commute from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and almost immediately got a headache. And though plenty of people are able to use noise canceling without problems, I’m hardly alone. Since the technology became consumer facing in the 2000s, thousands of users have reported bouts of dizziness, nausea, headaches, and other weirdness.

As a technology noise canceling isn’t all that complicated. The modern version was developed in the mid 20th century to help airline pilots tolerate noise in the cockpit. Essentially, a microphone reads the sound from the surrounding environment while an algorithm cooks up an inverted wave of the same amplitude. The resulting antinoise cancels out whatever is coming in, ostensibly flattening the wave.  

Now, noise canceling may be valuable for preserving your hearing if you’re navigating a plane or in a chatty workplace or surrounded by jackhammers on a construction site. It’s when we’re moving through the world that things get a little tricker. Sound and the external cues that the environment provide are obviously important to ambulation and balance, and studies have found that a lack of sound can lead to a higher risk of falling, especially for older people. 

So what explains the headaches? In this 2020 story on Medium’s now-defunct Elemental (great site, RIP), Allie Volpe talked to Dr. David Eisenman, a professor of otorhinolaryngology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, who had this to say about people who felt dizzy when they used noise canceling while, say, out on a run (bold is mine): 

 “…obviously your ear is working very rapidly, sensing every single movement and trying to sustain your stability,” Eisenman says. “If you have something that’s messing with normal auditory input — which noise-canceling headphones are doing — it’s conceivable that could contribute to a sense of disorientation if you are doing a repetitive motion.”

Not great! That’s sort of in the same neighborhood as motion sickness, or when your body is at a standstill and your audiovisual system is sending conflicting messages that your body is in motion.

Then there’s David McAlpine, a professor and researcher at Macquarie University who specializes in hearing and linguistics. He’s been sounding the alarms, so to speak, for a few years on the hidden dangers of noise canceling and how it actually might be rewiring our brains. From an April Gizmodo article that you should read in its entirety:

McAlpine says your brain overcompensates to [active noise canceling] by turning up its internal gain. He says this creates a “listening loss,” as operating at an increased sensitivity alters your neural pathways. 

“If you have a listening loss, it’s like changing your brain’s encryption,” McAlpine said in an interview. “Even if you can change what you’re hearing, you may not get back to the brain state that you had before. It’s not reversible.”

And here’s McAlpine again sounding off in the Guardian last year:

“If you stop putting sound into your ears … your brain overcompensates by turning up its internal gain,” McAlpine says. “It completely alters your neural pathways – we know this. Monkeying around with the sound energy going into your ears is monkeying around with what your brain evolved to be doing.”

I’ve reached out to McAlpine with a few follow up questions and will update this post if I hear back. But I find his argument convincing. For now I’ve since turned noise control off any time I’m moving around—at the gym, running an errand—and might switch on noise canceling once in a while if I’m sitting down and stationary, and the coffee shop is loud. But the reason I’m so suspicious of noise canceling as a consumer technology is it’s designed to fix a problem that technology is responsible for introducing into our lives in the first place, in this case… noisy distractions. It reads as a bafflingly Western solution to what should be a non-problem, where more is more is more is more is more; 6 to 11 daily breads.

Anyone else feel weird when they use noise canceling? Or am I delusional? Interested to hear what you think below.

And as always, thank you for reading HEAVIES. If you found this post interesting please consider becoming a paid subscriber for the monthly cost of a single Balthazar croissant.