So it seems that silence, that hard-won love so few seem to acquire, has been shown by studies (“has been shown by studies”) not to be the absolute most conducive environment for productive, creative work. What these government-grant-funded studies have given us, instead, is the knowledge that a low-decibel just-above-white-noise level of noise will do it, you know, like the background hum and noises of your local coffee shop. So a few geniuses got together and started a website, coffitivity, where you can stream just such a noise. Here’s how the NY Times sums up the research:
In a series of experiments that looked at the effects of noise on creative thinking, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign had participants brainstorm ideas for new products while they were exposed to varying levels of background noise. Their results, published in The Journal of Consumer Research, found that a level of ambient noise typical of a bustling coffee shop or a television playing in a living room, about 70 decibels, enhanced performance compared with the relative quiet of 50 decibels.
A higher level of noise, however, about 85 decibels, roughly the noise level generated by a blender or a garbage disposal, was too distracting, the researchers found.
Here’s a link to the actual study at The Journal of Consumer Research. Here’s the conclusion, in the researcher’s (Ravi Mehta, Rui (Juliet) Zhu, and Amar Cheema) own words:
While ambient noise is omnipresent, our understanding of its impact on human cognition, particularly creative cognition, remains limited. In this study, through a series of five experiments, we demonstrate how and why ambient background noise can affect creativity. Specifically, we show that a moderate (vs. low) level of ambient noise induces processing disfluency, which leads to abstract cognition and consequently enhances creativity.
In other words, the noise of a coffee shop might just counter-act the hyper-focus induced by the coffee itself? Maybe.
Well, all that to say, I have been using both the streaming service and just recently the new apps, one for the Mac, one for iOS, and while not at all conclusive as to higher productivity can attest that it’s pleasant, and conducive to good work. I’ve been doing good work lately (instead of blogging, etc.) and after years of working in silence have been running this background noise and even a low level of music atop it (the iOs App lets you control the relative volume of coffee house and music, so long as you don’t, like me, use Spotify or Pandora).
So I wanted to embed a recent episode of Seinfeld’s Comedian in Cars Getting Coffee, on where he picks up Seth Myers in a ’73 Porsche Carrera, but they’ve gone and done this most uncreative thing, by putting them up on Crackle, who doesn’t allow embeds and doesn’t even work from its own site. But here’s the link to it at the CiCGC website. Watch this episode, or all of them, liberally. Do it now, because everything good comes to ruin.