Long-Term Effects of Noise

Abstract

The brain vividly responses to instantaneous changes of the environment with the period less than several seconds, because the auditory temporal window is usually less than 5 s. Therefore, annoyance and loudness are responded in such a short time and much have been investigated. However, a long-term temporal sensation for a stimulus changing slowly in several minutes is weak enough and usually does not come to aware of it. Thus, the long-term effects of noise more than one year may not be perceived. Integrated effects on the body development of unborn babies, born children, and specialization of hemispheres of growing children are not known, and we shall make an attempt to discuss for the future of body and mind of human being in this chapter. Since 1968, effects of aircraft noise on unborn babies and children were investigated around the Osaka International Airport, Japan, which is located in Itami City. We have found that: (1) Effects on the mind: Postnatal effects of aircraft noise on sleep of babies were depend on the period when their mother came into the noise area in reference to the pregnancy period. It has been appeared as an adaptation to aircraft noise of newborn babies (Ando and Hattori in J Acoust Soc Am 47:1128–1130, 1970; Ando and Hattori in J Sound Vib 27:101–110, 1973; Ando and Hattori in J Acoust Soc Am 62:199–204, 1977a). (2) Effects on the body: Time-integrated effects of the aircraft noise on developments of the body of unborn babies have been found in terms of human placental lactogen (HPL), in turn appeared decreasing the birthweight (Ando and Hattori in Br J Obstet Gynaecol 84:115–118, 1977b). (3) After the birth, an effect of development of the height has been investigated (Schell and Ando in J Sound Vib 151:371–382, 1991). (4) Time-integrated effects on development of the specialization of cerebral hemispheres of children have been found, which were clearly described by the results of testing two different mental works, which are called the left and the right hemisphere tasks. Typical effects of the daily noise appeared as a temporal abandonment in the adding task (Ando et al. in J Sound Vib 43:683–691, 1975; Ando in J Sound Vib 127:411–417, 1988; Ando in J Sound Vib 241:129–140, 2001). This may considered that integrated effects of noise are appeared as decrease of the spiritual power. (5) Results obtained here have allowed us to design the human healthy environment of urban, so that many airports constructed after 1977 in the world have been moved out from residential areas.