I hate people who play the radio at work, and women who keep the TV playing in the backgound in another room while they have visitors, such as a card game.
They say it helps them concentrate, but I know they seem to be a lot slower, and often are humming along while everybody else is trying to get them to pay attention.
What would be best would be data already collected to show a drop-off in accuracy. I have a feeling they don’t allow radios on assembly lines or in coal mines, fearing a distracted worker.
Failing that, can you propose a test that would demonstate my point?
I thought of this one, but have been told it’s not really fair or accurate. Maybe I could modify it.:
Timed Test: pinpoint with highlighter on a map a set number of street intersections, chosen from a hatful at random.
Then add music and see if you can beat the time.
The problem is how to make it blind-blind, and I’m not real clear on that, having only seen it described for tests on prescription drugs. I guess you would have to avoid stating what the test is about, maybe make it seem like a game.
TV/Radio doesn’t distract some people. I’m not entirely sure why, but when I have music playing, I actually think better. Maybe because it’s outside stimuli that keeps things like homework from getting monotoneous and boring.
Considering that every day I see people on the trains doing work or reading, and the train noise is just as loud as any radio or television if not louder at times, I don’t think that a radio or television strictly as background noise is a real distraction.
Of course, if its a television and people are actually sitting facing the set and watching the screen like they’re at home, that’s a different story.
Background sounds seem to help or hurt depending on the part of my brain they’re occupying. If I’m doing some math-intensive or otherwise left-brained problem, music seems to help by blocking out other, possibly interfering distractions. If I’m doing something language-oriented (e.g. reading fiction, writing a document), my singing/humming along keeps breaking my inner monologue. (When I’m reading, this always leads to that annoying feeling where I’ve gone through three pages and I realize I have no idea what I’ve just read.)
And, I think my baseline distraction level is non-zero. When I’m in a silent room, I’m really distracted: I tune in to some ringing that I normally can’t hear, or there’s some unpredictable creaking-cracking of the walls. (Hmm. I guess it’s not a silent room, then.)
Unfortunately I can’t offer any data like you asked for, but personally I agree with Pasta. The more silent a room is, the more each singular noise seems distracting. If a room is silent enough, ie a study hall specifically designed to kill all outside noise, even the sound of my heartbeat in my ears starts to drive me crazy.I concentrate best with the TV, stereo, outside noise, friends talking, and sometimes the computer playing a completely different song, just so there is so much white-noise my mind doesn’t notice anything that happens as out of the ordinary.
My pet hate about this is when you go to visit someone and they are so addicted to the TV, it has to be left on. I don’t do this when the same people come to visit me, I turn it off (if it was on) and give them my full attention. To do anything else is downright rude.
I’ve always seen it as a symptom of growing up in a noisy modern environment, 24 hour TV, car radios, traffic, neighbors, etc. My brother can’t sleep without the TV on, and if I shut it off he’ll wake up and turn it on. Silence isn’t something we’re used to and its seen as being wrong. I’m sure it makes people more comfortable, like puppies going to sleep by listening to a ticking alarm clock that sounds a lot like mom’s heartbeat. More comfortable probably equals more efficient workers.
I bet it also has a lot to do with the withdrawl effect of media, especially TV. You need the sound bites, tinny laugh tracks, and crass commercials to feel right. TV is your friend, wouldn’t you like your friends at work with you?
It depends on what kind of work you do. I used to work at a Photo Lab, sort of a Photo Lab Sweat Shop, if you ask me. I was in the Art Dept. We sat at our little cubicles, using teeny brushes and photo dyes, and filling in blemishes and flaws in teenager’s portraits. 10 hours a day, (8 hours on Sat) during the busy season. We’d do hundreds of photos a day. Sometimes we’d fill in some stray hair or dust spot that got on a negative of a print - we’d use our teeny little brushes, and cramp our fingers, and fill in teeny little hair lines that got on a hundred fricking identical photos. It’s enough to drive you batty. You are damned right we needed radios or walkmans to survive. (We usually used walkmans, so we wouldn’t disturb each other.)
We’d bring in books on tape and listen to novels as we worked. It was wonderful - made the work almost bearable. We listened to talk radio or music. On occasion the jerks that ran the Photo Lab sweat shop would get their knickers in a bunch and not let us use our radios. Morale would go down, we’d get crabby and fussy and talk to each other more. And then we’d get our radios back. I have heard about other Photo Labs that insist that their artists use walkmans, because it helps them concentrate and survive the tedium.
However, since most photo labs are going digital, the days of an artist painstakingly painting on hundreds of prints is coming to an end. But for those kind of tedious, right-brain kind of jobs, I think the radio or TV would be absolutely mandatory.
I read of a study a few years ago proving that having classical music playing softly in the background helped studying. I then started playing it during the day when my son and I are studying different subjects. Math, it seemed helpful, but English subjects, it appeared to me to distract Billy more. That is MY unofficial experiment for you!
In psychology there’s the concept of state-dependent learning, which is basically that you’ll perform a task best under the same conditions in which you prepared for/learned the task. So if they learned to type letters/dig ditches/clone sheep while listening to the radio, then it’s definitely possible they perform best (but not necessarily speediest) while listening to the radio.
I know for a fact that when I listen to music I like, I do perform faster and do a much better job. In all areas of my life I do better. But when someone throws on the Dave Mathews Band, I crumble.
