I am often alone. Most of the time actually. And when you are alone, you usually don’t hear any talking. And it can be silent for a very long time without it feeling too long. So in these environments: being alone, being busy doing something, silence does not seem to have a limit for when it becomes uncomfortable. But with the experiments I did, the environments were a bit different. I filmed a couple of people while they just sat in silence, doing nothing but looking into the camera. They were challenged to be focused on the silence, instead of busy doing other things. You can watch the video first, it’s the one called ‘alone’.
In this experiment you can see the discomfort when the silence is experienced ‘too long’. I told them I wanted them to sit down and just be silent. Nothing about how long it will take. I stopped it when they asked me if they could stop. For some it was around two minutes, for others I needed to stop them after ten or fifteen minutes. The people who stopped early, told me they all felt weird to not do anything. Some of them naturally started searching for little things to do, like changing from sitting position, looking at the details of the space in front of them, or laughing to disturb the silence. And when there is another person in the room, it makes them watch themselves from that person's perspective. The camera also had a lot of influence. The thought that someone was going to watch it back, made some more uncomfortable. From a person who was silent for a long time, I heard he saw it as a little meditation, and that he just started to get silent with himself, and then I stopped him.
With another experiment, I did the same but in a group setting. The video’s are called group setting one and two. Now it is immediately less silent, because of the non-verbal communication between the people. The uncomfortableness becomes bigger because it is a very unusual situation. Being silent on your own is normal, so the first experiment says more about inner silence. But this experiment highlights the contrast of talking and not talking. In the video's you can read a lot out of the facial expressions, about how they experience the silence.
