Savage on living with noise

This is totally “off the wall” and will leave you wondering what a strange person I am (more than you already do).

Savage was talking about noise and how it bothers him – a caller related that he grew up next to an “L” in New York and he thinks that noise focuses your attention rather than distracting you.   I agree 100% 🙂

When I was in college, the weird psychology major next door asked if I wanted to be a subject in his experiment for psychology class.   It turns out his experiment was exactly based on the idea that noise interferes with your ability to think.

The test was:    I’m going give you a starting number.   I then want you to add to that number and say the number, then add 6, then 7, then 8, then 9.   So if I say 13, you say   19, 26, 34, 43, 49, 56 etc… and start back at adding 6 until I tell you to stop.

So I understand – this is math done in my head, I’m not writing this down as I go.   So after he had the “control” down of how far I got working in silence, he turned on a tape with various kinds of distracting noises to try to disrupt my train of thought.     Rather then slowing down, I got faster and more accurate.  He told me after the fact, that my skewed result kind of invalidated his hypothesis and maybe even hurt his grade 🙂

Had he come back to me before he published his results, I could have told him exactly why that happened.    The first was just the test itself.   After doing it once or twice, I realized the sum of the numbers added up to 30 and then the pattern was just repeating itself, so I got faster.

But the more important reason – tied to radio – is that I had trained my mind to do this.  With all the distractions in the dorm with people running around and playing their stereos, I would turn on two different radios to two different radio stations at the same time in order to blank out out the noise so I could focus on my work.

When testing stations for this web site, I would routinely fire up maybe 5 stations at once and see if I could pick out one station and listen to it while having my brain discard the noise from the stations I wasn’t listening to.   Your eyes and your visual system do this all the time, patching together snippets of vision into a coherent image you don’t even realize is a mosaic of what your eyes saw a tiny bit ago and your mind edits out things it deems are not important so you can focus on the snake about to bite you.