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A comment on Poor Man’s Bose – Open Office and on the Go Noise Control. Parent comment

Re:Poor Man’s Bose – Open Office and on the Go Noise Control by mikestew on Tuesday October 09, 2018 @05:49PM (#18180101)
As I've narcissistically considered my own comment since I wrote it, I think it might have to do with noise our lizard brains feel it has to process. Because as I thought back to my time in the shop, with the air tools, compressor in the back room, cars in and out...you know, I could probably plop down with a laptop and be fine hammering out some code. It's just noise (and for some reason, the thought of an air tool sound makes me think in a Pavlovian way that work is getting done!).

But "Hey, how about that game last night!" behind me and...

LizardBrain: "pattern identified: human speech. Attempting to parse...colloquialisms not found...setting parsing process to 'high' priority...audio sensitivity set to 100%."

ConciousBrain: "nooooo, I don't give flying shite about the SeaPigeons! Trying to work here!"

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Re:Poor Man’s Bose – Open Office and on the Go Noise Control by bunderbunder on Tuesday October 09, 2018 @06:00PM (#18180179)
Yeah, and, at least for me, people's attempts to try and be respectful of each other in an open office type situation make it worse instead of better. Talking in hushed tones makes the speech harder to understand, which makes the lizard brain work even harder.
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Re:Poor Man’s Bose – Open Office and on the Go Noise Control by MandieD on Wednesday October 10, 2018 @02:36AM (#18182496)
Working in an open office where the main language is your native language: you spend some cognitive energy tuning it out.

Working in an open office where the main language is a language that you understand well, but not natively (my every day life in Germany): you spend a ton of cognitive energy tuning it out, because your lizard brain insists on having that surrounding speech parsed first, just in case it has something to do with your work, because every so often, it absolutely does.

Working in an open office where you have absolutely no comprehension of the language (two weeks in Seoul): amazingly productive, because the lizard brain doesn't even bother.

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