Ehrm, maybe they’re just doing what I call “being back at the nun’s”.
I know I can look absolutely fascinated by presentations that have me bored out of my mind. It’s a technique I learned in primary school and which I can recognize in others - but way too many people can’t recognize it. When we had our first presentations with Latin Americans, my US coworkers were surprised at how attentive the LARs had been; people hadn’t been fiddling, sighing or, in general, giving signs that the presentation was as painful as we knew it to be. I had to explain about the technique and how to deal with it. Our audience hadn’t been attentive at all; merely, like me, they knew how to hide the fact that they were thinking about anything else. Those notes? In my case it’s the weekend’s shopping list.