I wear ear protection a lot. Gym, airports, busy places - sounds hit me harder than most people, and the AirPods with noise cancellation on were my armour everywhere. Last week I swapped them for Loops, the simple silicone earplugs. There's nothing inside them. It's a shaped piece of silicone that sits in the ear and turns the world down. One week in, and my brain feels more relaxed.
I didn't expect much difference. Both block noise, right? But they don't do the same thing at all. The AirPods are small computers with a bluetooth transmitter inside your ear canal, a few centimeters from your brain, sending and receiving the whole time they're on. And noise cancelling isn't silence - it's microphones sampling the room and tiny speakers pumping generated anti-noise into your eardrum, all day. The Loop does nothing. It just blocks sound the way a closed door does.
a transmitter, centimeters from your brain
Jack Kruse has been loud about this one for a while, and he's a neurosurgeon:
«All of this shit has biological effects. I don't care what it is. You put bluetooth headphones in your ear - dude, that's the stupidest thing you'll ever do.» - Jack Kruse
His mentor was Robert O. Becker, the researcher who showed in Navy studies back in the 60s and 70s that electromagnetic fields have biological effects - slower growth, stress markers, the works. Becker said it out loud on national TV and his funding disappeared. That story rhymes with a lot of stories I've learned since the money opened my eyes.
Here's the incentive part, because nobody has to be evil for this to happen. Apple removed the headphone jack, then sold us the wireless replacement. The convenient thing and the profitable thing lined up perfectly, and the question of what a radio inside your ear canal does over twenty years never made it into the keynote. The official safety limits measure one thing: how much the radiation heats your tissue. That's the whole test. Your sleep and your nervous system aren't on it.
one of these needs charging
One week is one week. Maybe some of it is placebo, maybe my ears just prefer real silence over generated anti-noise. I can't measure my own brain. But the trade costs nothing - the Loops are cheaper than a single AirPod, never need charging, and there's no firmware inside to update. When I actually need sound, I'm going back to the old wired earbuds everyone threw away. Kruse says even those aren't perfect. They're still a big step down from a transmitter living inside your head.
So this is where I've landed after a week. The Loops come with me to the gym, the airport and anywhere loud, the old wired earbuds cover the podcasts, and the AirPods haven't left the drawer.
Silence doesn't need a battery. Few understand.