Silence Therapy indicated.

This is certainly a worthy thought that naturally underestimates just how difficult it is to achieve.

That cave in the himalyas looks good to go.  however for the rest of us, our spas need to think this out.

The building itself needs to be isolated from passing traffic.  Then the space itself needs good airflow without listening to fans.  Just soundproofing your walls will be a challenge as our current standards are not good enough.

The take home though is that this is a service folks will want.  It is ideal for meditation and may be rigged to support a meditation ring as well.

Are you getting enough silence in your life?

Silence is very good for you. Noise, not so much. Stress, insomnia, heart disease—all results of the world screaming at you. Fun fact: Composer and Stanford music professor Jonathan Berger writes in Nautilus the word noise "shares its etymological root with the Latin 'nausea,' which, in turn, is rooted in the Greek 'naus' or ship. Noise, although an auditory phenomenon, is strangely related to seasickness."

Turns out, though, silence is a healer. The quiet spaces between audible sounds stir a region in our brain called the default mode network. Which is remarkable to realize. As journalist Daniel A. Gross writes in "This Is Your Brain on Silence," "even in the absence of a sensory input like sound, the brain remains active and dynamic."

In fact, when the default mode network is in session, the brain cells involved in concentration are sent to their rooms and told to be quiet. Too much conscious focus narrows the mind.

Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin tells Nautilus readers the default mode network is also known as the daydreaming mode. "If you’re a carpenter and you’re hammering, you’re really paying attention. That’s the central executive mode. Its opposite is this daydreaming mode."

Levitin explains that mentally lounging in daydreaming mode can be restorative. He compares it to sleeping:

"During sleep, there’s a lot of cellular housekeeping going on, getting rid of dead cells, purifying the bloodstream, organizing the thoughts of the day and consolidating them into memories. And that’s also what happens in a waking state during the daydreaming mode. There’s something healing and restorative about it."

There's something else healing and restorative. When the daydreaming mode is activated by quiet, and our brain wanders across the landscape through our senses, we are freed to hear not one thing but everything.

This is the revolutionary point of artist John Cage's composition 4'33", known as his "silent piece," first performed in 1952 by pianist David Tudor at the Maverick Concert Hall near Woodstock, New York. The hall is designed like a rustic barn and includes seats both inside and outside under the sky. It's surrounded by trees in a sylvan patch of the Catskill Mountains.

Tudor sat at the piano for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, turned the pages of a score, and didn't play a note. He then rose to his feet to receive applause. He got outrage. During a question-and-answer session with Cage and the other avant-garde artists on the bill, a local artist shouted, "Good people of Woodstock, let's run these people out of town." Clearly, peace and love hadn't come to Woodstock yet.

In his book about Cage and 4'33", No Such Thing as Silence, music scholar and composer Kyle Gann explains that Cage intended the work to be "an act of framing, of enclosing environmental and unintended sounds in a moment of attention in order to open the mind to the fact that all sounds are music."

The everlasting message of 4'33" is to listen for what we're missing in our noisy lives. Cage wrote that as a young composer he thought, "There seemed to be no truth, no good, in anything big in society. But quiet sounds were like loneliness, or love or friendship."

In quiet, our brain wanders and gathers information. We daydream with our ears. And hear the wind, the trees, the animals, and the rivers around us.

— Kevin Berger, Nautilus editor-at-large