At Work, Do Headphones Really Help?
Marissa Yu works in a busy office, surrounded by 120 co-workers in a mostly open space. Yet when she has a question, needs an update or tries to reach some of her colleagues, she might as well talk to the wall.
“You call their name one, two, three, four times, and they’re not responding,” says Ms. Yu, director of interiors in Houston for PageSoutherlandPage, an architecture and engineering firm. “You dial their extension and they’re not picking up. Pretty soon you’re throwing rubber bands across the wall.”
The culprit: ear buds playing music and noise-canceling headphones. Roughly three-quarters of Ms. Yu’s co-workers wear them, and they’re increasingly becoming de rigueur ear-wear in offices throughout the country. Many people argue that headphones are good at blocking distractions. And while a few employers ban their use, most tolerate it as a way for employees to regain some privacy in an open-plan office.
Research offers little support for the idea that listening to music improves concentration, says Robert Desimone, director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. In one of several small Taiwanese studies, listening to music with lyrics was linked to lower scores on tests of concentration in a study of 102 college students, published online earlier this year by the journal Work. In separate research, listening to hip-hop music was linked to a significant reduction in reading-test scores, based on a study of 133 adults published in 2010 in the Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.
A third study of 89 students ages 19 to 28, led by researchers at Fu Jen Catholic University in Taiwan, found that workers who either loved or hated music being played where they were working scored lowest on tests of attention, compared with workers who didn’t have strong feelings about the music or who worked in rooms without music. People naturally pay more attention to music they strongly like or dislike, hurting their ability to focus, the study says.
In the office, listening to music with lyrics while trying to read or write can distract employees by overtaxing verbal-processing regions of the brain, neuroscientists say.
The prefrontal cortex, the brain’s control center, must work harder to force itself not to process any strong verbal stimuli, such as catchy lyrics, that compete with the work you’re attempting, Dr. Desimone says. The more cognitive work required to screen out unwanted input, the fewer cognitive resources remain for the task at hand. And the longer you try to concentrate amid competing distractions, the worse your performance is likely to be. “Attention takes mental effort, and we can get mentally tired,” he says.
Individuals respond differently to music, scientists say. For some, a familiar piece of music without lyrics can serve as a sound-blocker, helping screen out a colleague’s loud voice.
Using noise-reducing headphones can be an even stronger aid to concentration. Headphones can screen out as much as three-fourths of office noise, says Steven Orfield, president of Orfield Laboratories Inc., an architectural design, research and testing company in Minneapolis. But when you take them off, “for a couple of minutes, everything is going to sound way too loud for you” while your ears adjust, Mr. Orfield says. “You may be speaking louder” to others.
Noise-canceling headphones, which were developed by Bose Corp. for use by airline pilots more than 20 years ago, are often marketed to air travelers; they work especially well on planes because they help cancel the low-frequency rumble of jet engines. In an office, they may help quiet the higher-frequency sounds of speech and other ordinary activity, so “the user enjoys a controllable, comfortable level of loudness,” says David Reynolds, a facility management consultant in Jackson, Miss. This reduces fatigue for some people, he says.
Man stranded in desert builds motorcycle out of his broken car
cording to Merriam-Webster, ingenuity can be defined as “skill or cleverness in devising or combining” or “cleverness or aptness of design or contrivance.” We’d say that’s an apt description of a Frenchman named Emile who reportedly found himself stranded in the deserts of Northwest Africa after breaking a frame rail and a suspension swingarm underneath his Citroën 2CV.
What to do? Why, disassemble the broken hulk and build yourself a motorcycle from its pile of parts, of course! As the story goes, Emile was able to use the inventive machine to escape the desert, though not before convincing the local authorities that he wasn’t an insurgent and paying a fine for importing a non-conforming vehicle…
Since Emile was the only soul in the area, nobody has been able to confirm the veracity of the events that led to the little French runabout’s conversion into a makeshift motorcycle. That said, judging by the images you can see here (apparently from the March 2003 issue of 2CV Magazine), this Citroën-bred two-wheeler does indeed exist, and it was definitely fashioned from parts scavenged from an old 2CV.
Emile, wherever you are, we take our hats off to your real-life MacGyver skills, sir.
Ways Self-Driving Cars Will Make You Love Commuting
Ordinary Americans can’t buy intelligent, self-driving cars just yet, but the technology could someday revolutionize one of the nation’s most common road rituals — the morning and evening commutes that bookend the workday for millions of people.
The transformation of that bleary-eyed, coffee-chugging routine won’t take place overnight — Nevada just issued the world’s first license for a self-driving vehicle to Google on May 7. But the gradual switch to a hands-off driving approach promises perks including saving on gas money, faster commutes and the luxury of texting on smartphones without risking a crash.
“We’ve been working on this and thinking about it for the past 10 years or so,” said Peter Stone, director of the Learning Agents Research Group at the University of Texas in Austin. “The point of this research is to consider the implications for having all or most of the cars on the road being autonomous.”
Take a Rest on the Road
Today’s drivers must give up hours to the daily drive back and forth from work. Tomorrow’s self-driving car owners can settle back in the comfort of their ride to get a start on work emails, browse the news headlines or catch up on a favorite TV show — all without worrying about getting lost, switching lanes on the highway or squeezing into tiny parking spaces.
“These kinds of systems will be to the point where you can flip a switch and they’ll be fully autonomous,” Stone told InnovationNewsDaily. “Many cars can already park themselves and have active cruise control.”
Goodbye to Red Lights
Traffic lights may go extinct once self-driving cars rule the road. Tomorrow’s self-driving cars could “talk” wirelessly using an automated system that calculates the paths for cars to make turns or whiz through intersections without stopping.
Such intersections could shrink average road delays by as much as 100 times in the most extreme circumstances, Stone said. He and his colleagues previously created a simulation showing cars streaming past one another at an intersection with only the slightest slowdowns in speed — a somewhat terrifying sight for today’s drivers. But such changes would only be possible once everyone owns a self-driving car.
“We found that most benefits of autonomous intersections don’t really kick in until most cars on road are autonomous [a 90 percent penetration level],” Stone explained. “But at every point along the way, we found small benefits for people with autonomous cars.”
Celebrate National Chocolate Chip Day with ‘perfect’ cookies
Chocolate chips are so beloved that they have their own day of celebration on May 15th. There’s no wrong way to eat these morsels, whether thrown into ice cream, muffins, pancakes or anything else we can use as an excuse for a chocolatey bite. Of course, nothing beats fresh out of the oven chocolate chip cookies.
So pay homage to the chip, which was created by Nestle in 1941, by making these PERFECT chocolate chip cookies, courtesy of Chris Kimball from America’s Test Kitchen. What makes these cookies so great? The secret is the brown butter… and lots of it. Enjoy!
Chris Kimball’s perfect chocolate chip cookies (makes 16 large cookies)
- 1 3/4 cups (83/4 ounces) all-purpose flour
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 14 tablespoons unsalted butter
- 3/4 cup packed (51/4 ounces) dark brown sugar
- 1/2 cup (31/2 ounces) granulated sugar
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
- 1 large egg plus 1 large yolk
- 1 1/4 cups (71/2 ounces) semisweet chocolate chips or chunks
- 3/4 cup pecans or walnuts, toasted and chopped (optional)
Melt 10 tablespoons butter in 10-inch skillet over medium-high heat. Continue cooking, swirling pan constantly, until butter is dark golden brown and has nutty aroma, 1 to 3 minutes. Transfer browned butter to large heatproof bowl. Add remaining 4 tablespoons butter and stir until completely melted.
Add brown sugar, granulated sugar, salt, and vanilla to melted butter; whisk until fully incorporated. Add egg and egg yolk; whisk until mixture is smooth with no sugar lumps remaining, about 30 seconds. Let mixture stand for 3 minutes, then whisk for 30 seconds. Repeat process of resting and whisking 2 more times until mixture is thick, smooth, and shiny. Using rubber spatula, stir in flour mixture until just combined, about 1 minute. Stir in chocolate chips and nuts, if using. Give dough final stir to ensure that no flour pockets remain and ingredients are evenly distributed.
Working with 3 tablespoons of dough at a time, roll into balls and place 2 inches apart on prepared baking sheets.
Bake 1 sheet at a time until cookies are golden brown and still puffy and edges have begun to set but centers are still soft, 10 to 14 minutes, rotating baking sheet halfway through baking. Transfer baking sheet to wire rack; let cookies cool to room temperature.
Tips:
- Avoid using a nonstick skillet to brown the butter; the dark color of the nonstick coating makes it difficult to gauge when the butter is sufficiently browned.
- Use fresh, moist brown sugar, as hardened brown sugar will make the cookies too dry.
- This recipe works with light brown sugar, but the cookies will be less full-flavored.
