工作場所戴耳機真的有用嗎?大綱

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.

瑪麗莎•餘(Marissa Yu)是休斯敦建築工程公司PageSoutherlandPage的室內裝潢主管，她在一個嘈雜的辦公室裏辦公，近乎全開放式的辦公環境中有120個同事環繞在她的周圍。然而，當她想問個事、瞭解點情況或叫某個人時，卻屢屢碰壁。

"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休斯敦建築工程公司PageSoutherlandPage的辦公室內，有四分之三的員工戴着耳機工作。瑪麗莎說，“你叫他們的名字三四遍，卻得不到一點反應。你打分機過去，他們不接，最後你只好衝他們扔橡皮筋。”

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.
造成這種情況的罪魁禍首是：員工在用耳機聽音樂，或戴上降噪耳機免受干擾。瑪麗莎約有四分之三的同事戴着耳機工作，耳機也正成爲美國各地辦公場所的一樣必備工具。許多人認爲，戴耳機有助於減少外界干擾。雖然有些公司禁止員工在工作時戴耳機，但大多數公司還是默認了這種行爲，以便讓員工在開放式的辦公環境中重新獲得一些私人空間。

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.
麻省理工學院(MIT)麥戈文腦科學研究所(McGovern Institute for Brain Research)所長羅伯特•德西蒙(Robert Desimone)表示，幾乎沒什麼研究結果可以證明，聽音樂有助於提高注意力。臺灣做過幾次小研究，其中對102名在校大學生的一次研究發現，聽歌曲反而會降低他們注意力測試的成績，該報告於2012年初發表在電子期刊《Work》上。另一項對133名成年人的研究顯示，邊聽嘻哈音樂邊做閱讀測驗會大大降低考試成績，該報告於2010年發表在《教育學學者雜誌》(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.
臺灣的天主教輔仁大學(Fu Jen Catholic University)對89名19到28歲的學生做過一項研究，發現一邊幹活兒一邊聽自己喜歡或厭惡的音樂會導致注意力測試成績排名最末，還不如聽一些自己無所謂的音樂，或根本不聽音樂。人們會很自然地把更多注意力放在自己喜歡或不喜歡的音樂上，因此無法專心做事。

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.
神經學家表示，在辦公室一邊聽歌曲一邊閱讀或寫作會讓腦部的語言處理區負擔過重，導致分心。

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.
德西蒙博士說，前額皮質是腦部的控制中心，一個人在從事工作時，如果前額皮質受到語言類刺激，如好聽的歌曲等，就很難控制自己的注意力不出現下降。腦部要動用更多的認知能力來排除不需要的信息，用於手頭工作的腦部認知資源就會減少。腦部努力控制注意力不分散的時間越長，你的工作效果就可能越差。德西蒙說，“集中注意力需要花費心思，因此容易出現精神上的疲勞。”