I search of golden silence

Do you not dread the approach of Christmas with the certain knowledge that every shop you enter welcomes you with canned carols? Or the fellow passenger who pulls out his cellphone to make a call, forcing all others to listen in? Or the hotels that believe you cannot make it through a meal without music in the background? Even at breakfast, for goodness sake.

Do you not want to take a large hammer to the small jet engine your neighbour insists on using to blow away the tiny handful of leaves that have settled in his front garden, smash it into even tinier pieces and hand him a broom that would do the job in a fraction of the time - and quietly?

Do you not nod in (silent) agreement at the result of a recent survey that asked office workers what most annoyed them about the behaviour of their colleagues, and found that they put eating noisily at the top of the list by a large majority? Do you not applaud the hotel chain that has installed noise meters in its corridors that flash a warning light if people are talking too loudly and offer a refund to guests who failed to get a good night's sleep because of noise?

We can even - just - forgive the company for calling them "ssshhh-o-meters".

The man who cancelled his long-standing membership at his gym when it started playing loud music - and successfully encouraged other members to join him - asked the obvious, if rhetorical, question: "Who wants a raving disco at 7am?"

The music, said the gym owners, was "motivational".

If you are old enough to have children, you may by now be starting to feel a little uneasy. You may fear you are settling into a stereotype - the selfish old grump who wants to stop others having fun/expressing themselves in their own way/indulging your own old fogeyism. You should resist that temptation. You should instead feel virtuous. It's for their own good.

There have been many studies proving the damaging effect of noise at work. Hearing loss is the most obvious problem. But more recent research also suggests that another noise-related hazard is raised blood pressure.

Even more worryingly, perhaps, is the effect of noise on children.

The British Medical Journal has reported research that shows the ways in which children exposed to constant noise can suffer. One study looked at children of primary school age living in 32-floor blocks of flats near a main road. The children on the lower floors were affected much more severely than those living higher up. Not only was their hearing damaged, but it was shown that they did less well at school. They had greater difficulty processing information, had poorer memories and also had more difficulty concentrating.

Another study that compared children living near a railway line with pupils at the same school who lived in a quieter area found significant differences in reading ability; the mean reading age of the railway children was three to four months behind the others. The solution to that is obvious, if not achievable, given the difficulty of rehousing half the population of any big, noisy city.

But noise exists on a different level, too, and it's much trickier to see how we deal with that.

Modern society demands that, if we have something to say, we must make a great deal of noise or we will not be heard.

The days of the quiet thinkers who were listened to because of what they thought, rather than how they said it, have long gone.

In her book, Quiet, Susan Cain describes the introvert/extrovert divide as the most fundamental dimension of personality. She reckons at least a third of us are on the introverted side of that divide and some of the most talented people in history have been introverts - and yet, she says, it is extroverts who have now taken over.

These are the people with an excess of ebullience, excitability, risk-taking behaviour, thick skins, boldness and a tendency toward quick-thinking and thoughtless action. They have come to pose, she argues, a real menace.

The outsize reward-seeking tendencies of the hopelessly outer-directed helped bring about the bank meltdown of 2008, as well as disasters such as Enron.

With the economy now in ruins, Cain writes, it's time to establish "a greater balance of power" between those who rush to speak and do and those who sit back and think.

Maybe - but don't hold your breath.

Humphrys presents the BBC Radio 4 programme 'Today'