Choke That Cellphone User? Wait. Here's Why
Have you ever wanted to kill (oops, contain) someone yakking on their cellphone next to you on the bus? Had to read the same paragraph over 12 times to get its meaning? Been unable to work on an assignment your boss needed yesterday? A new study has found why. It's because our brains feel the need to fill in the blanks when we only hear one side of a conversation. According to Douglas Quenqua, "College students who were asked to complete anagrams while a nearby researcher talked on her cellphone were more irritated and distracted — and far more likely to remember the contents of the conversation — than students who worked on the same puzzles while the same conversation was conducted by two people in the room." As Tyger Latham reports, "According to Joe Palca and Flora Lichtman, authors of Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us , the reason cell phone conversations are so grating to most of us is because they are in fact "half conversations," in whi...