This article does everything except actually answering the question in the title.
Clearly more noise than signal from the author.
Why noise is necessary for our brains to perform at a high-level
11–20 of 158 posts
Re: Why noise is necessary for our brains to perform at a high-level
#12This article does everything except actually answering the question in the title.
I think it may be a GPT3 blog:
>Noise is necessary for our brains to function in an orderly fashion. In the book The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver says that “The signal is the truth. The noise is what distracts us from the truth.”7 Andrew Smart adds that “there are many circumstances in which the addition of the right amount of noise actually boosts the signal.” So within the randomness of the noise, we can achieve greater creativity as the randomness of evolution brings the best out of humans.
Re: Why noise is necessary for our brains to perform at a high-level
#13I am Deaf myself and using my hearing aids all of my life. One thing I discovered that silence is the best productivity focus for me. During my job, I always keep my hearing aids off. This helps with my ADHD as I am easily distracted when there is a sound involved, sometime causes me to ‘hyperfocus’ in my “world” than doing my job. And interesting that I found that keeping my hearing aids off makes the time around me…
I have similar issues with distractibility with sounds. Music sometimes helps, and white noise is good, but sometimes I’d love to be able to just turn my ears off. The worst situation is feeling the need for enough audio stimuli to feel “right”, but that level is too distracting to allow for focus.
Agreed with you there. It is so hard to find the right sounds that could help me to focus but it turns out it made it worse. There are few sounds that does help me to focus like heartbeating, I have a 30min opus file that is purely heartbeats. I gravities toward repeating sounds because they are easier to focus as they are rhythmic. Anything that are not rhythmic will mess with my pacing.
Re: Why noise is necessary for our brains to perform at a high-level
#14For me, it's not so much noise but temperature and air freshness. I don't know why but if the stale is a tad too stale in my home office I just get distracted and can't focus well so I wind up opening the window before starting work so I can freshen the air and then close it to minimize the amount of city noises from creeping in. But I'll also say sound is important as well. It's why I like having a more clicky keyboard although my office mates are probably frustrated by my preference. A little bit of noise in the background is nice whereas full-on chatter pretty much puts my work to a stop.
Re: Why noise is necessary for our brains to perform at a high-level
#15I am Deaf myself and using my hearing aids all of my life. One thing I discovered that silence is the best productivity focus for me. During my job, I always keep my hearing aids off. This helps with my ADHD as I am easily distracted when there is a sound involved, sometime causes me to ‘hyperfocus’ in my “world” than doing my job. And interesting that I found that keeping my hearing aids off makes the time around me…
Very odd question, but if as a person experiencing difficulty hearing who can get partial hearing from a hearing aid, can you experience binaural beats, which are essentially non-sound neurological artifacts of the brain processing and filtering slightly different tones?
Meta analysis of them here, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00426-018-1066-8 , full paper is on sci-hub.
Almost everything about binaural beats is very non-sciency and full of woo and nonsense, but if the ability to "hear" the brain artifact that doesn't register on the spectrogram of the sound caused by them were different for people experiencing hearing loss, experiencing the binaural beat "tone" in your head could indicate the persistence of some kind of physiological effect independent of direct hearing ability. If a person with reduced hearing didn't hear the binaural beat artifact, it would probably be just a harmonic or a simple wave interference pattern, and not the mysterious phenomenon it gets sold as.
I ask because they are a particular type of noise that you can use for focus and consistency to drown out other noises, similar to white, pink, rain sounds and other flavours of noise.
Re: Why noise is necessary for our brains to perform at a high-level
#16I've worked in private offices, cubicles, open plan offices, coffeeshops, libraries, and now many many hours in home both when other family members are around and when they aren't. I spend a lot of time thinking about sound and focus.
The conclusion I came to is that humans have a few emotional needs in order to reach deep focus:
1. We need to not be distracted and we need to feel certainty that we will not be distracted. Before we are comfortable untaking the work to architect a giant mental castle, we need to feel confident that someone won't come around to kick it down.
2. At a more primitive, simian level, we need to feel that we're in a safe environment. It's hard to focus on code if you're worried that a tree is going to fall on you or a lion will drag you off into the jungle.
When it comes to sound, those can be opposing. Because we are a social species, I think one of the things that makes us feel most secure is the ambient present of a fellow tribe. To our early ancestors, dead silence meant you were alone, and being alone in the wilderness was often a death sentence. We instinctively feel safest when we hear the chatter and hub-bub of relaxed tribemates puttering around nearby. We know we're not alone, that there are others will also be alerted if something happens, and that they also feel safe.
But the presence of fellow people can also mean that at any moment one of them might wander over and start talking to us. So hearing that ambient chatter can make it really hard to focus.
This is, I think, part of why working in a coffeeshop can be so effective. You get the sense of safety in numbers, but since they are all strangers and at least in the US the social norms go against talking to strangers, you know the odds are slim that you'll actually be interrupted.
Re: Why noise is necessary for our brains to perform at a high-level
#17I've worked in private offices, cubicles, open plan offices, coffeeshops, libraries, and now many many hours in home both when other family members are around and when they aren't. I spend a lot of time thinking about sound and focus. The conclusion I came to is that humans have a few emotional needs in order to reach deep focus: 1. We need to not be distracted and we need to feel certainty that we will not be distra…
> we need to feel certainty that we will not be distracted.
This, so, much. Working from home with a young kid around, it always feels like something's gonna fall, the cat is gonna fight back, mom is gonna get mad at him for some reason, or simply he needs me to go play with him. I never know if I have 5 minutes or 3 hours.
Nowadays I tend to not work so much during the day as I don't have the means to focus, then work into the night.
Re: Why noise is necessary for our brains to perform at a high-level
#18I've worked in private offices, cubicles, open plan offices, coffeeshops, libraries, and now many many hours in home both when other family members are around and when they aren't. I spend a lot of time thinking about sound and focus. The conclusion I came to is that humans have a few emotional needs in order to reach deep focus: 1. We need to not be distracted and we need to feel certainty that we will not be distra…
Is this why I have my best thoughts in the shower?
Re: Why noise is necessary for our brains to perform at a high-level
#19I've worked in private offices, cubicles, open plan offices, coffeeshops, libraries, and now many many hours in home both when other family members are around and when they aren't. I spend a lot of time thinking about sound and focus. The conclusion I came to is that humans have a few emotional needs in order to reach deep focus: 1. We need to not be distracted and we need to feel certainty that we will not be distra…
Re: Why noise is necessary for our brains to perform at a high-level
#20I've worked in private offices, cubicles, open plan offices, coffeeshops, libraries, and now many many hours in home both when other family members are around and when they aren't. I spend a lot of time thinking about sound and focus. The conclusion I came to is that humans have a few emotional needs in order to reach deep focus: 1. We need to not be distracted and we need to feel certainty that we will not be distra…
good observations, I’ve had some similar theories that you have better articulated
https://noiz.io was a lifesaver during quar’. virtual coffeeshop, artificial rain storms, even an ST:TNG-style outer space hum