Fascinating stuff on how stress can affect the brain. The most interesting part for me:

Gary Evans and environmental psychologists at Cornell found that low-level noise in open-style offices seems to result in higher levels of stress, and lower task motivation.

Forty experienced female clerical workers (average age 37) were assigned for three hours to either a quiet office or one with low-intensity office noise (including speech). The workers in the noisy office experienced significantly higher levels of stress (as measured by urinary epinephrine, a stress hormone), made 40% fewer attempts to solve an unsolvable puzzle, and made only half as many ergonomic adjustments to their workstations, compared to their colleagues in quiet offices.

Interestingly, however, the workers themselves did not report higher levels of stress in the noisy office.

“But just because people fail to report that environmental conditions are negative, we can’t assume that there are no adverse impacts,” Evans says.

via LifeHacker