According to a recent study, whining that you don’t wanna go to school has proven to be the most distracting sound one can hear. In fact, it was found to be more irksome than a screeching table saw.
Researchers Rosemarie Sokol Chang and Nicholas S. Thompson conducted their study looking into how attachment vocalisations affected an individual’s attention. Here, the attachment vocalisations would be whining, infant crying and “motherese”, or the cooing your mum does when baby spits up at the table. All three styles broke the concentration of adults trying to complete simple subtraction problems, and did so more effectively than a table saw, neutral noise and absolute silence. Whining was at the top of the list, only proving that we are hardwired to respond to other people bitching and moaning. Probably because we’d do anything to make it stop. [Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology via MSNBC]