Walk into any Starbucks on a weekend afternoon and you will find two things to be universally true: 1) The Unicorn Barf Frappuccino is gone and never coming back, so please stop asking about it, and 2) There are way too many people with laptops exploiting the cafe as their own public office space. Maybe you’re about to join them, yourself.
周末的午后，走进任何一间星巴克，你会发现两个定律：第一，不用问了，独角兽星冰乐已经彻底下架了；第二，许多人带着手提电脑，将咖啡馆当成了他们的办公场所。或许，你也准备成为他们中的一员。
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Anyone who has ever used a Starbucks for work purposes knows there is a special appeal about getting stuff done in the company of strangers and muffins. There is a palpable, productive, caffeinated energy in the air, an invisible camaraderie that cannot exist in the quiet of a home office. The productivity is literally contagious. You may even argue that you are more creative when working or writing at a coffee shop—and science is ready to back you up on that.
这并不是什么坏事。任何一个曾经在星巴克办公的人都知道，在一群陌生人旁边，吃着小蛋糕把工作搞定，有其特殊的魅力。空气中弥漫着一股咖啡因刺激下的十足干劲。那种无形的情谊是安静的办公室里无从体会的。工作效率确实是会传染的。你可能会说，在咖啡馆工作或写作会让你更有创造力——科学证明，你是对的。
It turns out there literally is something productive in the air in public places: namely, the sound waves. A 2012 study from the University of British Columbia found that, counter-intuitively, a moderate amount of background noise can actually make you more creative than the bliss of silence.
事实是，在公共场合，空气中确实存在着能让你做事更加高效的东西——它便是，声波。英属哥伦比亚大学2012年的一项研究发现，比起一片寂静，适度的嘈杂声响实际上会让你更有创造力，这一发现与我们的日常认知背道而驰。
This conclusion resulted from an insidious study in which researchers piped increasing volumes of background noise into a room full of students engaged in word-association tests and product brainstorms, both of which demanded focus and creativity. Students performed best and generated the most creative solutions when working under moderate noise conditions—70 decibels of ambient sounds. They performed worse in low noise (50 db, the volume of a quiet room) and poorest in high noise (85db, the volume of a garbage disposal). Incidentally, 70 db is about the same volume of background noise that you’d find in a crowded cafe.
研究人员让学生们进行词汇联想测试及产品头脑风暴。这两项活动均需要注意力和创造力。实验过程中，研究人员逐渐将背景噪音的音量调高，暗中观察学生的表现，最终得出了上述结论。他们发现，当背景噪音为中等程度——70分贝时，学生的表现最好，提出的创造性方案最多。背景噪音降低（50分贝，房间处于安静状态）时，他们的表现有所打折。而噪音很大（85分贝，相当于垃圾处理厂的声音）时，他们的表现最差。巧合的是，70分贝正好是一间咖啡馆坐满人时的环境噪音音量。
What’s going on here? According to the researchers, a little distraction can be a good thing thanks to a mind trick called “processing disfluency”—basically, the ease or speed in which you can process information.
这说明了什么？研究人员表示，稍微分下心有时候是件好事儿，因为我们的大脑会耍一个小花招，产生“处理不畅”——简单来说，就是指人脑在处理信息时的放松程度和运转速度。
While a “fluid” mental processing speed is most helpful for highly-focused tasks like, say, filing your taxes, this laser-focus can be detrimental to abstract thinking—you are mentally too close to the problem to be able to think abstractly, too caught up in the particulars. “This is why if you’re too focused on a problem and you’re not able to solve it,” said Dr. Ravi Mehta, one of the UBC paper’s authors. “You leave it for some time and then come back to it and you get the solution.”
在处理纳税申报等需要精神高度集中的工作时，“流畅”的思维处理速度对我们最有助益。而全神贯注不利于我们进行抽象思考。你的大脑过分关注细节，过度聚焦于这个问题，反而无法进行抽象思考。该研究论文的作者之一拉维•梅塔博士表示：“这就是为什么当你的精力过度集中时，可能无法解决问题。先将其放到一边，回头再看，你就会得到答案。”
Just like shifting your focus away from the problem at hand, a moderate amount of noise can shake up your processing fluency just enough to approach ideas from a more creative, abstract position. The gentle bustle of a Starbucks forces you to approach your work from a slight mental distance, boosting creativity—but as soon as the barista hits the coffee grinder, your focus goes veering off track.
就像把注意力从眼下的问题上挪开一样，适度的噪音可以促进大脑处理信息时的流畅度，让你刚好可以进行更有创意的抽象思考。星巴克微微的喧闹能让你在工作时稍微分心，激发你的创造力——不过，当咖啡馆的员工开始磨咖啡时，你的注意力便开始偏离正轨了。
The same is true if a song you can’t stand suddenly starts yodeling over the cafe speakers, or if the table next to you can’t contain their blathering political opinions; as a recent Japanese study points out, sounds that produce feelings of annoyance, regardless of their volume, have an adverse effect on productivity. “Meaningless” noise serves the creative best.
同样的，当咖啡馆里的音响突然开始播放你无法忍受的曲目，或者隔壁桌喋喋不休的政治讨论已经传过来时，你便再也无法集中注意力了。日本最近的一项研究指出，那些会让人恼火的声音，不论音量大小，都会大大影响人们的工作效率。“毫无意义”的噪音才能最大程度地激发大脑的创造力。
