There’s a new buzz on TikTok – well, not a buzz exactly. It’s more of a hum, maybe waves crashing, a purring fan or steady, heavy rain. To me, it sounds like an empty aeroplane, cruising peacefully at altitude. It’s brown noise, a close cousin of the better-known white noise, and TikTok users, particularly the platform’s ADHD community, are all over it: there are 85.3m views for the #brownnoise hashtag.
One top-rated video (1.3m views) shows user @NatalyaBubb trying brown noise. She looks initially startled, then spellbound. “Where did all the thoughts go?” reads the caption over her wide-eyed face. Commenters on her and other brown-noise clips are mainly – though not exclusively – rapturous. “I closed my eyes and literally thought of NOTHING … it makes my brain feel soft in the best way possible”; “This felt like fresh air to my ears”; “Like a soft weighted blanket that I’ve safely swathed my brain in,” says one writer with ADHD.
