Over the summer, I tried to find a patch of quiet. I spent some time

wearing a portable EEG device on my head in different settings,
trying to get a sense of which kind of places put me in the holy grail
of brain states, the “calm alert” zone prized by Zen masters, surfers
and poets. I was after alpha waves. When electricity in the alpha
wavelength dominates parts of the brain, it’s a sign that you are not
hassled by small distractions, problem-solving or, my peeve, meal
planning. Parenting—any kind of caretaking—is a procession of
small, endless decisions. Too often, I assume the executive function
for the whole family, and I can almost hear my mind stomping out
any rogue alpha waves. It’s the sound of brain fry.

Daily aggravations aside, environmental noise deters alphas
because we have to either pay attention to the intrusion or actively
resist paying attention to it, and that’s work too. I couldn’t quite hit
the alpha zone walking in the city parks near my house, and I couldn’t
even attain it on a leafy, rural road in Maine either, probably thanks to
nearby construction noise, which ended up pissing me off. When my
brain waves were later read by the interpreting software, it fired back
this message: “This indicates that in this state you were actively
processing information and, perhaps, that you should relax more
often!”

Even the software was yelling at me. I wanted to yell back, but
this would be a mistake. There are no alpha waves when you’re mad.

And the maddening truth is, the world is getting louder.
Can you hear it? “Noise” is unwanted sound, and levels from
human activities have been doubling about every thirty years, faster
than population growth. Traffic on roads in the United States tripled
between 1970 and 2007. According to the U.S. National Park Service,
83 percent of the land in the lower forty-eight states sits within 3,500
feet of a road, close enough to hear vehicles. For planes, the figures
are even more dramatic: The number of passenger flights has