and children’s cognition, funded by the European Union and
published in the Lancet in 2005, researchers followed several
thousand children attending elementary schools near major airports in
the U.K., Spain and the Netherlands. They found significant impacts
on reading comprehension, memory and hyperactivity. The results
were linear: for every 5-decibel increase in noise, reading scores
dropped the equivalent of a two-month delay, so that kids were almost
a year behind in neighborhoods that were 20 decibels louder (results
were adjusted for income and other factors). There’s something real
to the phrase “you can’t hear yourself think.”
As the authors of an important review paper on noise grimly
noted: “The different types of stress reactions may . . . exert an
adverse influence on the equilibrium of vital body functions. These
include cardiovascular parameters such as blood pressure, cardiac
function, serum cholesterol, triglycerides, and free fatty acids,
hemostatic factors (fibrinogen) impeding the blood flow in terms of
increased plasma viscosity . . . and presumably blood sugar
concentration as well.”
These health effects are serious. I’m frankly surprised they aren’t
better known, and that flight-path real-estate values don’t seem to
reflect them, at least not in D.C. After reading the studies, I loaded a
decibel meter app on my phone. To my children’s amusement, I’ve
taken to running around and measuring the noise levels in and out of
the house. Distressingly, they are comparable to levels associated
with hypertension and learning delays in the studies I’ve been
reading. I asked for noise-canceling headphones for Christmas, and I
often wear them while working at home. Reagan National limits
flights at night, but many international airports around the world
don’t. Technology offers some hope: jets have grown quieter in recent
years and even muffled helicopters are being developed. Every
decibel matters.
Interestingly, the researchers describe another outcome of hearing