心理译作：安静比说话更吵闹？！

你在图书馆看书的时候，是不是经常被旁人的咳嗽、打嗝干扰，而在大街上就不会有这种事情？
是的，你没有看错！安静比说话更吵闹！刻意设计的安静环境，实际上会增加干扰性，因为在完全安静的环境中，任何细小的声响都会被人们听到。事实上，在安静、宽敞的工作环境中，要想集中思想，只能提高背景声音强度，而不是降低声音强度。-Psytopic.com

沉默是金  沉静是烦

呆在家里，我便会整天沉迷游戏，不能自拔（译者：老外说他常玩Viggo’s Revenge，各位大虾不知道有没有玩过，翻译完了很空虚，不知道哪里有下载）；去办公，则会不断有人催问“书写得怎么样了？”所以我大部分时间都会在伦敦书馆，那儿也是不少知名作家经常光顾的地方。

最初，图书馆让我感到惬意。因为，在这儿我发现不少名家也为写作发愁，和我一样。当我把这段字打到电脑里的时候，坐在我旁边的一位英国畅销书作家，双手捂脸，估计马上就要精神崩溃了。看来我果然没有说错。

不过，有利也有弊那就是噪声。你会不断地听到这些知名作家发出各种声音：咳嗽、hack up phlegm吐口水、嘬矿泉水塑料瓶、狂敲键盘、偷打电话、偷听手机音乐——Dark Side of the Moon、长须短叹，写不出来东西；没吃午饭的吃药片，吃过午饭的打呼噜，有时还要放屁，晕呀！

现在我才发现图书里原来那么吵。以前我在家工作，和在《金融时报》的大办公室里上班的时候，都没觉得有那么吵。其实，小的时候家里就一直很吵：厨房里好想每分钟都会有盘子打碎；小孩永远在哭、姑妈永远在喊——到底发生了什么？

几名科学家早先就曾对“工作地点的噪声”做过研究，那天我一早上都在的有关这些的研究报告。诸如，《办公室噪声与工作效率实例研究》，登载在好像《应用心理学月刊》之类杂志上。

这样文章都有很能吸引人的主题。比如，讲话声是不是比其它噪音更容易使人分心；很多人在那儿说话更烦人还是只有一个人在那儿说话更烦人。做的实验更有趣，比如，收集很多小便检验“压力荷尔蒙”水平。不过得出的结论我是看不懂。

在经过审慎的考查后，一些科学家宣布，“坐在两个站这说话的人中间，最让人心烦”；另一些则主张“办公室里最烦人的是响个不停的电话”。

老实说，我实在不敢苟同这些观点。照我说，最讨厌的声音莫过于下午4、5点肚子饿得咕咕叫的时候，突然听到有人在那儿嘎巴嘎巴地啃苹果。听得这种声音，我保证每个人都会有杀人的冲动。（译者：附英国提示，尽量多吃生梨。）

当我正准备把这些学术报告都扔到一边去的时候。我发现了它：

本杰明•马克汉姆（Benjamin Markham）的《普林西顿大学17所图书馆声音环境质量报告》，最早发表于美国声学研究会第146次会议。

读到这个标题时，我已经准备向我周围的噪音投降了。但大标题的小字吸引了我：刻意设计的安静环境反倒更易使人分心，因为在完全安静的环境中，任何细小的声响都会被人们听得。事实上，在安静、宽敞的工作环境中，要想集中思想，只能增强背景噪音，而不是消除噪音。

这条理论完美的解释了，我最近的分神。在寂静的图书馆里，最细微的打嗝声听起来都会像一头河马在广播喇叭里打嗝。

不过，另外还有一个现象我始终都没找到科学依据。某种程度上，某人因噪声产生的烦躁程度还取决于噪声的发出者是谁。

例如，你颐指气使的老板摸出一个苹果嘎巴嘎巴地啃，肯定比MM摸出一个苹果嘎巴嘎巴地啃，更能让你产出杀人地冲动。

我想，我现在如此心烦意乱很可能是因为周围的人我一个也不认识。人们常常容易讨厌不认识的人。我本打算在图书馆的意见簿里留言，建议他们增强背景噪音。但最后，我做了更简单的一件事，那就是同那些名作家们“喷”，不过是在出了阅览室以后。

原文：

Silence is louder than words

Sathnam Sanghera

TO STOP myself wasting entire weeks at home playing Fur Fighters: Viggo’s Revenge, and to avoid being asked, “How’s the book going?” in the office, I have been spending a large proportion of my time in a London library popular with a certain number of established writers.

At first I loved it, not least because it was fantastic to discover that a certain number of established writers find writing as difficult as I do. As I type these words in the reading room, one of Britain’s best-selling authors is sitting at the desk next to me with his head in his hands, apparently on the brink of a full-scale nervous collapse. It’s fantastically reassuring.

But there is one downside: the noise. I am constantly distracted by the sound of these established writers coughing, belching, hacking up phlegm, slurping bottled water, clacking maniacally at their keyboards, listening surreptitiously to voicemails, listening surreptitiously to Dark Side of the Moon on their iPods, sighing heavily when work is going badly (it always seems to be going badly), swallowing indigestion tablets after lunch, snoring at their desks after lunch, farting after lunch and the like.

This irritability is a new thing. In the past, when I worked at home or in the open plan office of the Financial Times, I was relatively resilient to background noise. I grew up in a loud household — the perpetual crashing of kitchen equipment mingling with the ceaseless screaming of children and the endless whooping of aunties — so what on earth has happened?

Usefully, it transpires that the topic of workplace noise has been tackled by several academics so earlier this week I devoted an entire morning to reading papers with titles such as A case study of office speech noise distraction and work productivity in periodicals such as the Journal of Applied Psychology.

Unfortunately, while the questions they examined were fascinating — exploring whether speech is more distracting than other workplace noise, whether a single voice is more distracting than a babble of voices, and so on, and while the experiments they detailed were very entertaining, involving, as they sometimes did, measuring the stress hormone levels in office worker’s urine — the conclusions were either incomprehensible, obvious or wrong.

After much deliberation, one set of researchers came to the conclusion that “overheard conversation” was the most distracting noise in the office. Another set of researchers concluded that “continuously ringing telephones” were the most distracting noise in the office.

Frankly, I find it hard to take either claim seriously, for if there is one thing that anyone who has worked in any office knows, the most annoying noise — the one thing guaranteed to make anyone homicidal — is the sound of someone slowly chomping an apple at their desk.

I was about to give up on these academics when I came across Benjamin Markham’s A survey of the acoustical quality of seventeen Libraries at Princeton University, originally presented at the 146th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America.

I nearly gave those snoring around me a run for their money when I read the title, but beneath it lay a simple but profound observation: workspaces that are designed to be quiet actually
increase distractions because in a completely quiet space workers can literally hear anything. In fact, in quiet, open workplace conditions, “freedom from distractions” may be achievable only by increasing the levels of background sound, not decreasing them.

This paradox explains my recent irritability very well. In the peaceful stillness of a library the slightest hiccup sounds like a rhinoceros belching thunderously over a public-address system.

However, there is something else to say about office noise for which I can proffer no scientific proof, but which is nevertheless true: to some degree, one’s irritation with a noise depends on who is making it.

For example, the sound of your overbearing, moustachioed boss slowing chomping an apple will be more irritating than the sound of the girl-you’ve-always- fancied-from-marketing doing the same. There are some people so annoying that even their breathing grates.

Indeed, I’ve come to the conclusion that at least some of my current irritability is due to the fact that I don’t know any of the people around me, and it is always easy to dislike people you don’t know. I was planning to tackle the problem by putting a note in the library suggestion book recommending the introduction of background noise to the building, but instead I’m going to do something simpler: I’m going to start talking to the established
writers sitting around me. Though not in the reading room, of course. Financial Times.

作者： Sathnam Sanghera  译者：Jeremy(PEGroup成员)
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