There’s an article about it in the New York Times which apparently goes into much more detail, but I don’t have a subscription- https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/10/science/silence-sound-hear.html
It is excerpted in this Slashdot post, however, and that may give you enough information to understand it better: https://science.slashdot.org/story/23/07/10/2343221/silence-is-a-sound-you-hear-study-suggests
To sum up, it’s not about total silence, it’s about perceiving gaps in louder sounds as “sound” rather than the lack of sound.
Tomatoes can be grown pretty successfully indoors. Also prickly pear.