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.
玛丽莎余(Marissa Yu)是休斯敦建筑工程公司PageSoutherlandPage的室内装潢主管，她在一个嘈杂的办公室里办公，近乎全开放式的办公环境中有120个同事环绕在她的周围。然而，当她想问个事、了解点情况或叫某个人时，却屡屡碰壁。
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.
Michael Stravato for Wall Street Journal休斯敦建筑工程公司PageSoutherlandPage的办公室内，有四分之三的员工戴着耳机工作。玛丽莎说，你叫他们的名字三四遍，却得不到一点反应。你打分机过去，他们不接，最后你只好冲他们扔橡皮筋。
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.
造成这种情况的罪魁祸首是：员工在用耳机听音乐，或戴上降噪耳机免受干扰。玛丽莎约有四分之三的同事戴着耳机工作，耳机也正成为美国各地办公场所的一样必备工具。许多人认为，戴耳机有助于减少外界干扰。虽然有些公司禁止员工在工作时戴耳机，但大多数公司还是默认了这种行为，以便让员工在开放式的办公环境中重新获得一些私人空间。
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.
麻省理工学院(MIT)麦戈文脑科学研究所(McGovern Institute for Brain Research)所长罗伯特德西蒙(Robert Desimone)表示，几乎没什么研究结果可以证明，听音乐有助于提高注意力。台湾做过几次小研究，其中对102名在校大学生的一次研究发现，听歌曲反而会降低他们注意力测试的成绩，该报告于2012年初发表在电子期刊《Work》上。另一项对133名成年人的研究显示，边听嘻哈音乐边做阅读测验会大大降低考试成绩，该报告于2010年发表在《教育学学者杂志》(Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning)上。
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.
台湾的天主教辅仁大学(Fu Jen Catholic University)对89名19到28岁的学生做过一项研究，发现一边干活儿一边听自己喜欢或厌恶的音乐会导致注意力测试成绩排名最末，还不如听一些自己无所谓的音乐，或根本不听音乐。人们会很自然地把更多注意力放在自己喜欢或不喜欢的音乐上，因此无法专心做事。
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.
神经学家表示，在办公室一边听歌曲一边阅读或写作会让脑部的语言处理区负担过重，导致分心。
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.
德西蒙博士说，前额皮质是脑部的控制中心，一个人在从事工作时，如果前额皮质受到语言类刺激，如好听的歌曲等，就很难控制自己的注意力不出现下降。脑部要动用更多的认知能力来排除不需要的信息，用于手头工作的脑部认知资源就会减少。脑部努力控制注意力不分散的时间越长，你的工作效果就可能越差。德西蒙说，集中注意力需要花费心思，因此容易出现精神上的疲劳。