This is totally “off the wall” and will leave you wondering what a strange person I am (more than you already do).<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0\u00a0 I agree 100% \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0\u00a0 It turns out his experiment was exactly based on the idea that noise interferes with your ability to think.<\/p>\n
The test was:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I’m going give you a starting number.\u00a0\u00a0 I then want you to add to that number and say the number, then add 6, then 7, then 8, then 9. \u00a0 So if I say 13, you say \u00a0 19, 26, 34, 43, 49, 56 etc… and start back at adding 6 until I tell you to stop.<\/p>\n
So I understand – this is math done in my head, I’m not writing this down as I go.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rather then slowing down, I got faster and more accurate.\u00a0 He told me after the fact, that my skewed result kind of invalidated his hypothesis and maybe even hurt his grade \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
Had he come back to me before he published his results, I could have told him exactly why that happened.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The first was just the test itself.\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
But the more important reason – tied to radio – is that I had trained my mind to do this.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … Continue reading