I could be far off base here, but I wonder if this could be tied to why humans are generally considered more capable of learning in adolescence - the older someone gets, the more noise they find around them. Lecturers' voices, phones ringing, music, cars and the like are all things you hear progressively more after age 3 or so.
There's a (loosely) related thread under today's article about John von Neumann's assistant[1] about von Neumann's alleged preference for working with loud music playing (something I've seen corroborated in places like Turing's Cathedral, where it was also mentioned that he liked working with noise in general; to what degree any specific music was preferable, I can't discern, though that book mentioned loud marches). It seems there may be some individual (or, at least, situational) variability with how noise affects productivity and thought.
The perceived structure or unstructuredness of the noise in the mind of the listener seems like it also may be relevant, at least from my own experiences - similar to how looking at a wall of code can induce anxiety in novice programmers, but someone familiar with the language and systems employed can see forms and patterns, interpreting what the code actually does and reducing the level of cognitive dissonance that results from looking at it. FWIW, marches can be characterized by a strongly defined and relatively simple structure with a driving 1-2-3-4 pulse that carries the music along and frames our perception of it.
Stanislaw Ulam wrote of von Neumann: "If one has to divide mathematicians, as Poincaré proposed, into two types—those with visual and those with auditory intuition—Johnny perhaps belonged to the latter. In him, the 'auditory sense,' however, probably was very abstract. It involved,
rather, a complementarity between the formal appearance of
a collection of symbols and the game played with them on the one hand, and an interpretation of their meanings on the other. The foregoing distinction is somewhat like that between a mental picture of the physical chess board and a mental picture of a sequence of moves on it, written down in algebraic notation." [2]
I'm nowhere near as cool as Von Neumann, but I find that loud noisy music helps me work. The noisier the better. It helps to drown out background sounds that catch the attention.
If you hear a door creak or a person speak, that's attention grabbing. Are they speaking to me? Is someone looking for me? Can I add to the conversation?
But with noise you are isolated. The attention grabbing sounds don't come through.
Not just the sounds of noise, but the mental busyness as noise... a child's mind is so much less full.
As adults we get so accustomed to "noise" that we often don't realize it's there. Every time I turn around, I have taxes or some other painful administrative thing to do. That's noise in my head that buzzes quietly at times or very loudly as a deadline approaches.
We have job noise - projects, human conflicts, financial concerns etc. There are home relationship noises - fears, doubts, conflicts, whatever.
This is why I suspect the practitioners of meditation claim to have so much peace and such improved intentional focus: they have learned how to turn down the background noise in their minds.
> This is why I suspect the practitioners of meditation claim to have so much peace and such improved intentional focus: they have learned how to turn down the background noise in their minds.
I play Chess, I'm not good but when I'm playing for an hour or two I completely don't think about anything else at all, it's mentally draining but in a good way (I find it the mental equivalent of a long bike ride).
In fact my perfect day would be two hours of chess and a three hour bike ride then a nap.
Perhaps I was a more troubled child, but my mind was constantly full of buzzing, illogical anxieties when I was a kid. Only now have I been able to outgrow them, and my mind is much more soothed.
There's good buzz and bad buzz. Or maybe I should say constructive and destructive. It's possible for the mind to be so flooded with ideas and solutions and other creative thoughts that it can be difficult to focus and complete any one thing before the next demands attention.
Either way, gaining some control or having some tool to choose when to quiet the noise can be very beneficial.
