There is something about human beings – or maybe it’s just me – that seems to make absolutely no sense.
Put me in a room with 100 people talking and I can work just fine. Put me near one person talking loud, and within minutes I’m wondering if duct tape is still sold by the roll and thinking, “shut the **** up.”
I first noticed this years ago while covering professional golf tournaments. The media centers at major events were often packed with reporters, photographers, broadcasters, and public relations staff. Hundreds of people would be moving around, conversations would be happening in every direction, televisions would be on, phones would be ringing, and laptop keyboards would be tapping away.
Yet somehow, I could sit down and write without a problem. The noise became part of the background. It was almost comforting in its own way. The room had a rhythm to it. Nobody expected complete silence because everyone was working. The collective hum of activity blended together into something my brain could easily ignore.
Then there is the opposite experience. Every office seems to have that one person. You know the one. The person who conducts conference calls at their desk instead of booking a meeting room.
The person whose voice somehow cuts through every other sound in the department – that person can drive me absolutely insane. The strange thing is that it often isn’t a volume issue. A crowded restaurant can be louder than a single office conversation. A sports bar can produce far more noise than one conference call.
Yet the crowd doesn’t bother me. The single voice does. I suspect the reason is that a crowd becomes background noise. Your brain recognizes that dozens of conversations are happening simultaneously and quickly decides that none of them are particularly important.
However, one voice is different. Your brain keeps trying to listen even when you don’t want to.
Whether you like it or not, your attention keeps getting dragged away from whatever you’re trying to do. For people who work with words, that interruption feels even worse.
Writing isn’t like changing a tire or mowing a lawn. When you’re in the middle of an article, your brain is juggling facts, research structure, wording, transitions, and ideas all at once. There is a flow to it.
When somebody interrupts that flow, you don’t simply lose thirty seconds. You lose the thread. You have to find your way back.
That’s why I could sit comfortably in a golf media center with two hundred journalists around me and remain productive for hours, yet one nearby conversation in an office could make me want to relocate to another floor of the building.
The older I get, the more I realize this isn’t really about noise. It’s about attention. A crowd asks nothing of you; it simply exists. One voice demands your brain’s attention, even when you’d rather be doing something else.
So if you ever see me happily working in a busy café, airport lounge or sports bar, don’t be surprised. Just don’t sit down beside me and launch into a forty-minute monologue about your vacation plans or that your car is making an odd sound.
At that point, the hundred strangers in the room will suddenly seem like the quiet ones.
johnberkovich.com 