Noise engineers Rick James, George Kamperman, Wade Bray, Rob Rand, and Steve Ambrose, all of whom have been refining the equipment and protocols necessary to measure the relevant acoustical energy from wind turbines, now think that the problem is low-frequency noise or in this case infrasound that pulsates, creating rapid air pressure fluctuations that are felt rather than heard and which are extremely difficult to measure. Similar noise and similar symptoms are found in Sick Building Syndrome, where the cause is pulsating low-frequency noise from maligned fans in large ventilation ducts. When this occurs in office buildings, these symptoms, too, have nothing to do with sleep.
The symptoms of Wind Turbine Syndrome include classic symptoms of vestibular disturbance, which are:
» nausea
» vertigo or illusory movement
» blurred vision
» unsteadiness
» difficulty reading, remembering, and thinking spatially
These are the questions I get from people: “Why did I lose my keys again?” “How could I forget that pot on the stove?” “Why can’t I figure out how to put this thing together?” “What’s wrong with me that I can’t follow this recipe?” “I was only going to get three things; how come I can’t remember what they are?” “Why can’t I follow what’s going on in this movie?”
These are all examples of everyday, visual-spatial thinking that my study subjects found they were inexplicably struggling with. Remember, a physician, two nurses, five fishermen, a farmer, an accountant—all practical people. Outside the study, nurses, pharmacists, teachers, programmers, contractors, realtors, an air traffic controller, a diplomat.
If the signals from the vestibular system are distorted, eye movements and spatial thinking—including mathematical thinking—become difficult and full of errors. This has been proven with a lot of research. Your body and brain literally have to know with great consistency, moment to moment, which way is up in order to orient in space, and to orient successfully in the mental representation of space, where a lot of memory and understanding take place. Spatial thinking is almost invisible or unconscious until something goes wrong with it. It’s that great space in the mind where you know things before you can say them, where you suddenly realize how things fit together, and where you can retrieve all sorts of visually interlinked memories. Its functioning depends on a smoothly operating and signaling vestibular system. This kind of thinking is most mysteriously and frustratingly distorted in Wind Turbine Syndrome, just as it is in other clinical forms of vestibular disturbance.
Other symptoms of Wind Turbine Syndrome suggest impacts on the inner ear in a general way: ringing in the ear or tinnitus, muffled hearing, and feelings of fullness, pressure, or pain in the ear. The inner ear includes the vestibular organs, which detect motion and position, and the cochlea, which mediates hearing. Together, the cochlea and the five vestibular organs (the three semicircular canals and the two otolith organs, the utricle and saccule) are delicate membranous structures linked together with the same fluid space inside all of them. The sensations that come from them are mediated by hair cells, which are so sensitive to motion that they respond to being bent the width of a hydrogen atom.
