Peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head • Hacker News Board

Re: Peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head

#11

Post by jimmies » Mon, Feb 19, 2018, 9:05 PM UTC

American culture of making noise and hyping is tiring and annoying at times.

Sports events are the most prominent example. Going to popular sports matches in the US: football, ice hockey, basketball, etc. and you'll be bombarded with ads, noise, hype from the loudspeakers and flashing lights from the huge screens -- every single second you're there. When you watch the Super Bowl, you watch more ads than you watch the game. Going to a soccer game which is the most popular sport outside of the US, the only sound you'll ever hear is when the fans actually make noise. And perhaps, the announcement when they substitute players. By the way, it's quite cool to be in a high-stakes soccer match: There are volunteering leaders emerging from the crowd that orchestrate the people naturally. Noise in sports events are great, but only when they are not from the stupid flashing screens.

It's not a surprise to me that the laugh tracks were invented in America. Their presence in modern American sitcoms is annoying at best. But now, I think the producers started to realize that.

I think we are happier when we're treated like adults who know how to feel and behave.

Re: Peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head

#12

Post by sneak » Mon, Feb 19, 2018, 9:06 PM UTC

jimmies wrote: post #11

American culture of making noise and hyping is tiring and annoying at times. Sports events are the most prominent example. Going to popular sports matches in the US: football, ice hockey, basketball, etc. and you'll be bombarded with ads, noise, hype from the loudspeakers and flashing lights from the huge screens -- every single second you're there. When you watch the Super Bowl, you watch more ads than you watch the…

I don’t go to sports matches very often in any country, but the american habit of yell-talking when dining out at a restaurant ruins most dinners out in the US for me. That, and televisions in establishments in which they are entirely inappropriate.

Re: Peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head

#13

Post by curlcntr » Mon, Feb 19, 2018, 9:19 PM UTC

Taking this another level, and, where I thought the article was originally going, there is an internal dialog going on even with external silence. An aspect of vipassana meditation (and probably others) is when that internal noise silences.

Re: Peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head

#14

Post by dwringer » Mon, Feb 19, 2018, 9:23 PM UTC

Mononokay wrote: post #3

montrose wrote: post #2

"Kirste found that two hours of silence per day prompted cell development in the hippocampus." This was in mice, but if silence turns out to grow neurons in humans too, that will be big news.

I could be far off base here, but I wonder if this could be tied to why humans are generally considered more capable of learning in adolescence - the older someone gets, the more noise they find around them. Lecturers' voices, phones ringing, music, cars and the like are all things you hear progressively more after age 3 or so.

There's a (loosely) related thread under today's article about John von Neumann's assistant[1] about von Neumann's alleged preference for working with loud music playing (something I've seen corroborated in places like Turing's Cathedral, where it was also mentioned that he liked working with noise in general; to what degree any specific music was preferable, I can't discern, though that book mentioned loud marches). It seems there may be some individual (or, at least, situational) variability with how noise affects productivity and thought.

The perceived structure or unstructuredness of the noise in the mind of the listener seems like it also may be relevant, at least from my own experiences - similar to how looking at a wall of code can induce anxiety in novice programmers, but someone familiar with the language and systems employed can see forms and patterns, interpreting what the code actually does and reducing the level of cognitive dissonance that results from looking at it. FWIW, marches can be characterized by a strongly defined and relatively simple structure with a driving 1-2-3-4 pulse that carries the music along and frames our perception of it.

Stanislaw Ulam wrote of von Neumann: "If one has to divide mathematicians, as Poincaré proposed, into two types—those with visual and those with auditory intuition—Johnny perhaps belonged to the latter. In him, the 'auditory sense,' however, probably was very abstract. It involved, rather, a complementarity between the formal appearance of a collection of symbols and the game played with them on the one hand, and an interpretation of their meanings on the other. The foregoing distinction is somewhat like that between a mental picture of the physical chess board and a mental picture of a sequence of moves on it, written down in algebraic notation." [2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16411799

[2] http://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1958-64-03/S0002-9904-1958-...

Re: Peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head

#15

Post by cyphar » Mon, Feb 19, 2018, 9:27 PM UTC

jimmies wrote: post #11

American culture of making noise and hyping is tiring and annoying at times. Sports events are the most prominent example. Going to popular sports matches in the US: football, ice hockey, basketball, etc. and you'll be bombarded with ads, noise, hype from the loudspeakers and flashing lights from the huge screens -- every single second you're there. When you watch the Super Bowl, you watch more ads than you watch the…

One thing I didn't understand when I visited the US is that people applaud in American cinemas. I don't understand why that's seen as appropriate.

Re: Peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head

#16

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Feb 19, 2018, 9:28 PM UTC

blunte wrote: post #10

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Primary schools are extremely noisy environments IME.

Not just the sounds of noise, but the mental busyness as noise... a child's mind is so much less full. As adults we get so accustomed to "noise" that we often don't realize it's there. Every time I turn around, I have taxes or some other painful administrative thing to do. That's noise in my head that buzzes quietly at times or very loudly as a deadline approaches. We have job noise - projects, human conflicts, finan…

[deleted]

Re: Peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head

#17

Post by sandov » Mon, Feb 19, 2018, 9:30 PM UTC

I was in Salvador, Brazil this summer and was disgusted by how loud everything was, people on the streets carrying speakers playing music, street sellers screaming, cars honking, I prefer the relative quietness of my southern Chile.

Re: Peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head

#18

Post by FeteCommuniste » Mon, Feb 19, 2018, 9:33 PM UTC

cyphar wrote: post #15

jimmies wrote: post #11

American culture of making noise and hyping is tiring and annoying at times. Sports events are the most prominent example. Going to popular sports matches in the US: football, ice hockey, basketball, etc. and you'll be bombarded with ads, noise, hype from the loudspeakers and flashing lights from the huge screens -- every single second you're there. When you watch the Super Bowl, you watch more ads than you watch the…

One thing I didn't understand when I visited the US is that people applaud in American cinemas. I don't understand why that's seen as appropriate.

Where did you go? The only time I have heard applause at a movie is when the credits roll.

Re: Peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head

#19

Post by FeteCommuniste » Mon, Feb 19, 2018, 9:35 PM UTC

sneak wrote: post #12

jimmies wrote: post #11

American culture of making noise and hyping is tiring and annoying at times. Sports events are the most prominent example. Going to popular sports matches in the US: football, ice hockey, basketball, etc. and you'll be bombarded with ads, noise, hype from the loudspeakers and flashing lights from the huge screens -- every single second you're there. When you watch the Super Bowl, you watch more ads than you watch the…

I don’t go to sports matches very often in any country, but the american habit of yell-talking when dining out at a restaurant ruins most dinners out in the US for me. That, and televisions in establishments in which they are entirely inappropriate.

Part of the yell-talking is trying to hear each other over the stupidly loud music and TVs in our restaurants. But I've noticed that even abroad Americans are louder than most nationalities when eating out.

Re: Peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head

#20

Post by mgkimsal » Mon, Feb 19, 2018, 9:41 PM UTC

cyphar wrote: post #15

jimmies wrote: post #11

American culture of making noise and hyping is tiring and annoying at times. Sports events are the most prominent example. Going to popular sports matches in the US: football, ice hockey, basketball, etc. and you'll be bombarded with ads, noise, hype from the loudspeakers and flashing lights from the huge screens -- every single second you're there. When you watch the Super Bowl, you watch more ads than you watch the…

One thing I didn't understand when I visited the US is that people applaud in American cinemas. I don't understand why that's seen as appropriate.

having lived here 40+ years, and seen many movies, I think I've seen/heard applause or cheering maybe... 2 or 3x? At the end of a fantastic movie, there may be cheering. Massive stunt that fools everyone - maybe. But cheering/applause at the cinema in the US is certainly not common.