PLATE V   8:12 to the city. One side audible.

NOTE 04 · CHAPTER I

Half a conversation

HABITAT    Trains, waiting rooms, open offices

One side of a phone call is harder to tune out than two people talking. In experiments, overhearing a “halfalogue” hurt performance on attention tasks while hearing both sides didn’t — likely because half a conversation is hard to predict, so the mind keeps working on the missing half.11