If A Tree Falls In The Woods…

We all know the age-old philosophical question:

If a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there to hear it (and nothing is there to record it), does it make a sound?

For some, the answer to this question is: we can never know. To know if the tree makes a sound we have to hear the sound, but we’re not allowed to hear the sound if we want to answer the question. The conundrum is real but don’t despair, dear reader! Neuroscience has an answer for you.

What’s Out There?

The world outside our minds - let’s call it The Out There (oh, you enjoy Stranger Things, too?!) - is rich with information. I mean like, if Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos’ bank accounts fell in love, got married, and had a money baby - that’s how rich The Out There is. As a dataphile, I love me some info but the truth is we don’t need all of that information. We’ve evolved to use the best subset of data for the task at hand - survival.

Over time, the marvelous machine that is the human body has learned what information in The Out There is critical for survival. We developed sense organs to harvest that information (eyes, skin, ears, nose, mouth) and translate it into a language our brain can speak - Brainese Brainish Albrainian neural signals.

Example: Color.

Color isn’t just pretty - it’s pretty useful. It’s useful to know which fruit is ready to eat or which fruit is spoiled. It’s useful to know what color the snake is, or which button on the nuclear control panel is red.

But for all of its usefulness, there’s one uber important fact about color that isn’t often mentioned:

Color does not exist in The Out There. Color is all in your head.

[…pause for processing time…]

It’s no joke - our eyes detect light waves and those waves are translated into neural signals. Those signals create the perception of color. The Out There gives us lightwaves; we perceive color.

Back To The Tree.

Now that I’ve shattered your reality, allow me to add to the chaos.

Sound also does not exist in The Out There. Sound is also all in your head.

The Out There gives us pressurized air waves. Brain’s translation: sound. So, when they say, “There’s no sound in space” what they really should be saying is, “There are no pressure waves available in the vacuum of space that we are able to sense and perceive as sound.”   

By this logic, we get a more concrete answer to our tree question:

If a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there to hear it (and nothing is there to record it), does it make a sound?

Answer: The tree never makes a sound. Regardless of whether anyone is there to hear it. The tree creates changes in pressurized air waves. If we zoom out and apply our logic to everything else in our world, we realize that nothing ever makes sound. Sound isn’t made, it’s perceived.

I’ll stop here and give you time to recover from this arboreal madness.

Stay safe and happy!

Dr. OH