"What was going on, the researchers believed, was that the moderate level of noise induced processing disfluency, defined as the loss of “the subjective experience of ease or speed in processing information.” Processing disfluency is basically a measure of mental distance: When it exists, fixating, or thinking closely, becomes just difficult enough that the mind doesn’t clench around the particularities of an idea. Instead, it has a looser attitude, and can shift perspectives. The right amount of processing disfluency spurs creative thinking—thoughts with a perfect “creative” distance from their subject. Too much processing disfluency, however, and coherence is lost. This isn’t textbook stochastic resonance, because creativity can’t be boiled down to signal detection. But, just like textbook cases, an optimum exists, after which benefits fall away parabolically.. .
People with ADHD often have low neural dopamine levels. This leads them to have memory and focus issues, and to seek excess external stimulus. Noise can have minor medicative effects for them; Göran Söderland and a team of researchers found that subjects with ADHD performed better on cognitive tasks under 81 db level of ambient noise (about the loudness of a garbage disposal), while control groups’ performance declined.7 “Participants with low dopamine levels (ADHD) require more noise for optimal cognitive performance compared to controls,” they write...
In people with ADHD, dopamine is usually too low—until environmental stimuli come in. Then, dopamine goes haywire, flooding the synaptic cleft and drowning out the signal, then getting drawn back into the system, creating yet more noise and confusion. A moderate level of constant noise acts like the classic stochastic resonant system: A signal gets enhanced and stays there. Dopamine rises on the tide of noise, but gently, without flooding. ADHD medication changes this balance, and patients often report increased sensitivity to external noise...
To live in New York means to get habituated to the noise of everyday life here. Researchers have seen the effect happen over time. As a neighborhood becomes more homogenous, and its residents sync their noise patterns, noise complaints tend to go down. This may explain why, controlling for other factors, gentrifying areas of the city display higher levels of noise complaints. City residents stop consciously recognizing noise as novel, and it becomes background, even if their bodies don’t always recognize it as such."
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