Dr. James Showalter is an assistant professor of social sciences and humanities at Langston University.

Today’s youth live in a sea of noise. Headphones, cell phones, earbuds, sub-woofers in cars proclaiming someone’s idea of music, all fill the ears and mind.

Despite my objections, I have students leave class to catch up on what kind of breakfast some distant friend had, or other essential tidbits. The area outside my office is an outdoor phone booth at the end of each class hour.

Students pour from buildings after class fumbling with cell phones to catch up on what they’ve missed from whomever during the hard-to-endure 55 minutes of class when they must be without such vital connections. They thrust earphones over their ears to return to whatever music blots out the natural and human world around. Do I exaggerate? Not much.

Yet this noise, all this talk and music, is not making the student smarter or sharper in the class. All this seeming human interaction does not seem to make humans more empathetic or wiser about their place in the universe. It is more like an endless wall of static. It seems to fail to make one a better student, to make one a better human, or to make one wiser about who they are.

Humans need silence. They need time alone. Today’s student seems to find little of either.

Noise hurts a student academically. It represents a distraction from studies. Those headphones or that earbud can drown out what your eyes are trying to take in from book or notes. In class, I often hear a student wearing earbuds and not only tell that person to take them out but then worry about that person’s eardrums.

Noise hurts you in your humanness. It blocks out the world. Constant tweeting and texting, or talk with faceless voice on a cell phone, places an electronic device between you and another human.

Face- to-face interactions are necessary and best; not only for giving knowledge of the other person that you cannot gain at a distance, but in telling you something about yourself. The noise of today also separates you from your natural environment. You miss a lot of the beauty of the world with music blasting in your ears. You lack full interaction with that world. You should be a person in the world, not an isolated sound bubble moving through it.

And the noise hurts the deepest part of you. It blocks that necessary quiet that allows introspection. No other animal has introspection but a lot live in noisy worlds. All cultures, all religions, have valued introspection for only through it can you affirm your morality and values, and only through honest introspection can you really know yourself.

Only you can look into the deepest parts of you, but you cannot if you are constantly being interrupted.

Some suggestions? Try using your phone only during a few set periods each day. Let every text message, every in-coming call (unless it’s from your child’s daycare or such) sit in your menu for at least an hour. … Go alone for a walk on our beautiful campus and leave the headphones and earbuds, the phone and all the rest, at home.

In short, find ways to bring silence back into your life. The self-knowledge you’ll gain will far outlast the ephemeral noises that intrude on your day.