So what's so great about silence? Well in the course of researching my book, I came across several studies into the impact that silence can have on both the body and the brain. In one study involving mice, silence was shown to promote the growth of brain cells in the part of the brain responsible for memory related to the senses. Scientists played mice a selection of sounds, including baby mouse cries, white noise, and silence, and observed that during silence, there was cell growth in the hippocampus. Another study looked at the impact of listening to music on the body, and the researchers found that if silence was inserted into a track of music, the blood pressure dropped, the heart rate reduced and the subject relaxed much more than when listening to a relaxing piece of music. This only happened when the silence was inserted in the middle of the tune itself. It didn't work for silence at the beginning or end of the experiment. So there's something about silence that comes in the middle of noise that's particularly beneficial. So silence can actually also enable people to actually say things that they've never been able to say before. I looked into the formation of the Samaritans, a support service for people that are feeling despairing or suicidal. The service was set up in the 50s by a vicar, and he started it because he had to conduct the funeral of a young girl who had taken her own life. The reason she took her own life is that she'd started her periods and thought she'd contracted some terrible disease and was dying. She was deeply ashamed of what was happening to her and had no one to talk to about it. It was this that inspired the vicar, Chad Varah, to set up the Samaritans as he didn't want people to feel that there were things that they couldn't talk about, particularly things that they were ashamed of.