[rwallace]

No. Don't use music or any other form of noise to drown out ambient sounds at work. It causes slow but irreversible damage to your hearing. In game theory terms, such an act constitutes rewarding defection (employer insisting on open plan office) with cooperation (harming yourself in an attempt to help your employer) - always a bad move.

[TrevorJ]

Can you provide some citations for this? At acceptable decibel levels I have a hard time believing this would be the case.

[rwallace]

I don't have any citations ready to hand but it's not a controversial claim; a Google search should find some. Intuitively, think of it this way: 'acceptable decibel levels' are what the human ear is optimized to receive at intermittent peak, not constant all day every day.

[ionflux]

I didn't know white noise causes hearing damage, sounds plausible, it's mildly annoying; the brown noise though sounds more like a waterfall and the effect is really mild and calming. In my case, we don't have an open plan office, just 3 chatty colleagues in the same space :D And they don't seem to get the headphones-on gesture.

[TheRealDunkirk]

I'm a guy who likes music LOUD. Like, walking to class with my Walkman in college would cause people I'd pass to stop talking and stare at me. I've bought new players because they weren't loud enough. I didn't like my Nexus phone (in part) because it wouldn't play music as loud as the iPhone. I'm 46 now, and setup and manage the sound system at my church, where we like it, er, noisy. I can say with confidence that I'm the second-best set of ears in the house (behind the pastor, who has perfect pitch), and that I've lost nothing of my hearing over my lifetime.

Additionally, I say that as someone who has had to -- at various gigs -- listen to music in headphones to drown out office noise while I programmed and sysadminned. I know the "loud music causes hearing loss" is a popular thing to say -- I've heard it my whole life, just like "sitting too close to the TV causes vision loss" -- but I just don't think it's true, or at least conflated with normal loss with age (which my wife is finally admitting to).

That being said, I've recently started trying various tricyclic antidepressants for migraine prophylaxis, and I've found that they can have quite an influence on concentration. Amitryptilene had a small-but-noticeable effect. Nortriptylene had a PRONOUNCED effect. It was like that movie with Bradley Cooper. I just zoned in for the whole day. I LOVED it, but it was making me (an INTP) completely manic. I'm now trying Desipramine, and it, too, has a small-but-noticeable effect. I'm trying to live with its side effect (itching) by cutting the 10mg pills in half, but it's getting worse again, like it's building up in my system or something.

When I'm on these drugs, I don't WANT to listen to music. I find that I _notice_ that it's a distraction. It's been a habit, but I work at home most of the time, and, when my concentration wavers, I stick through the issue by "ducking" it out loud, to myself.

So, IANAD, but it seems to me that a low dose of a TCA could be considered a nootropic. There are, like, 9 different drugs in the class, all with varying side effects. I wish I could talk to an expert to correlate the various known brain-chemical effects with the various cognitive and side effects, so that I could chose the best one for me after trying 3. Seems like that ought to be enough information to zero in on the right dopamine, seratonin, et. al. profile for me. If seratonin is the MAIN chemical involved with the concentration side effect, then there's a whole class of SSRI's to deal with. But I don't know.