Why We Work Better in Cafés

Why We Act · 7 November 2026 · Reviewed by Faisal Zaidi

What experiments on background noise say about creative thinking in a café, and what they say about work that needs quiet.

Answer to the question

Why do we work better in cafés?

For creative work, moderate background noise at 70 decibels beat low noise at 50 in five experiments, and adults produced more and more original ideas with ambient noise in a later study. Speech nearby disrupted memory and arithmetic tasks, so the café suits idea generation and a quiet room suits careful work.

Key takeaways

Ravi Mehta, Rui (Juliet) Zhu and Amar Cheema reported in five experiments that moderate noise at 70 decibels improved creative performance compared with low noise at 50 decibels, while noise at 85 decibels impaired it.
The authors explain the gain by saying moderate noise makes processing slightly harder, which promotes abstract thinking; the same level also reduced the extent of information processing.
In 42 undergraduates, ambient noise through headphones led to more ideas, and more original ones, on an alternative uses task than silence did.
In office experiments by Simon Banbury and Dianne Berry, speech disrupted prose memory and mental arithmetic, while noise without speech disrupted only the arithmetic.
In 30 students, a single background voice impaired serial short-term memory, and masking it, especially with nature sounds, reduced the impairment.

Whether we work better in cafés depends on the job: in experiments, a steady murmur helped people produce ideas and nearby speech got in the way of careful work. The two claims fit together because they describe different tasks.

Can a Murmur Loosen Creative Thinking?

Moderate background noise at 70 decibels produced better creative performance than low noise at 50 decibels in five experiments run by Ravi Mehta, Rui (Juliet) Zhu and Amar Cheema. The same moderate level raised people's stated likelihood of buying innovative products, and noise at 85 decibels worked against creativity. The authors explain the pattern by saying that moderate noise makes processing slightly harder, which pushes people towards more abstract thinking, and abstract thinking helps them make new connections. The same level also reduced the extent of information processing, so the gain belongs to idea generation and not to every kind of work.

Adults tested more recently produced more ideas, and more original ones, with ambient noise on than in silence, and those with higher flexibility produced more ideas in noise, according to Precious Mones and Jessica Massonnié. Forty-two undergraduates completed a card-sorting measure of cognitive flexibility and an alternative uses task, which asks for as many uses of an everyday object as a person can think of, once in silence and once with ambient noise played through headphones. Flexibility here means the ability to shift between ways of thinking, a trait that varies from person to person.

Who is in the room changes the result. In 44 children aged 5 to 11, multi-talker noise at 64 decibels did not raise creativity. Younger children with weaker selective attention gave fewer and less original ideas in noise, while children with strong selective attention were largely protected. The murmur of a café is a condition that interacts with the person, and that is the strongest reading the studies support.

Quiet Has Its Own Case

Cal Newport's Deep Work makes the opposite case for a different kind of effort. He argues that demanding, valuable work comes from long stretches of distraction-free concentration, and he recommends choosing a place and a routine for it so that starting costs as little as possible. A café is a place where nobody can promise the stretch will stay unbroken, which is why the café belongs to a different stage of work.

Office experiments show what the interruption looks like. Speech disrupted both prose memory and mental arithmetic across three experiments by Simon Banbury and Dianne Berry, while noise without speech disrupted only the arithmetic. The distinction matters in a café, where the sound is a blend of machines, music and voices, and the voices are the part the memory task could not ignore. Attention drawn to a conversation two tables away has to be drawn back, and the laboratory work on that return trip is set out in Does Task Switching Really Cost Time.

Sound can also be managed. A single background voice impaired serial short-term memory in 30 students recalling items in order, and the impairment shrank when the voice was masked, most of all with nature sounds, in work led by Helena Jahncke. Headphones worn with nothing playing made no difference to performance. Workload ratings stayed higher in every noisy condition than in quiet, so the masked conditions helped performance without making the work feel lighter.

The widest view comes from a meta-analysis by James Szalma and Peter Hancock, which pooled 797 effect sizes from 242 studies. Effects varied with the type of task, the loudness, the length of exposure and whether the noise was continuous or intermittent. Support for the older explanations, that noise raises arousal or that it masks the task, was mixed, and the overall pattern fitted an account in which stress-related changes in performance follow the mental resources available. That account leaves room for both sides at once: a task that needs loose, wide thinking and a task that needs a held sequence in mind draw on resources differently.

Matching Task to Table

Four moves follow from the studies, offered as suggestions:

Take open-ended work to the café, such as drafting options, naming ideas or listing uses.
Keep memory-heavy and arithmetic-heavy work for a quieter place.
Sit away from conversations, since speech was the disruptive element in the office experiments.
If headphones are worn, a steady masking sound did better than headphones with nothing playing in the one experiment that tested it.

Our view is that both sides are right about their own task. The café suits the stage of work in which options are wanted and nothing has to be held in order, such as naming, sketching routes or listing possibilities. A quiet room suits the stage in which a plan has to be remembered, a figure checked or a long passage read closely, and Deep Work is a sound guide to protecting that stage. Careful work also carries a cost that outlasts the noise, which Why Attention Residue Lingers at Work follows after an interruption ends. People also interrupt themselves, so a quiet room alone does not guarantee unbroken focus.

The creative advantage of the café also has a ceiling. In the Mehta, Zhu and Cheema experiments, noise at 85 decibels impaired creativity, so the benefit belonged to the moderate level and reversed above it.

Common questions

Why do we work better in cafés?

For idea generation, moderate background noise at 70 decibels beat low noise at 50 decibels in five experiments, and adults produced more and more original ideas with ambient noise in a later study. For memory and arithmetic tasks, speech nearby was disruptive.

How loud is too loud for creative work?

In the five experiments, noise at 70 decibels helped creative performance, while noise at 85 decibels impaired it.

Is quiet better for deep focus?

For tasks that rely on memory and arithmetic, speech disrupted performance in office experiments, and Cal Newport's Deep Work argues for distraction-free stretches for demanding work.

Do headphones help in a café?

In one experiment with 30 students, headphones with nothing playing made no difference, while masking a background voice, especially with nature sounds, reduced its effect on memory.

Sources

Newport, C. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Seed book; vault hub Books/Deep Work.

Mehta, R., Zhu, R. (J.), & Cheema, A. (2012). “Is noise always bad? Exploring the effects of ambient noise on creative cognition.” Journal of Consumer Research, 39(4), 784-799. doi:10.1086/665048 https://doi.org/10.1086/665048

Mones, P., & Massonnié, J. (2022). “What can you do with a bottle and a hanger? Students with high cognitive flexibility give more ideas in the presence of ambient noise.” Thinking Skills and Creativity, 46, 101116. doi:10.1016/j.tsc.2022.101116 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2022.101116

Massonnié, J., Rogers, C. J., Mareschal, D., & Kirkham, N. Z. (2019). “Is classroom noise always bad for children? The contribution of age and selective attention to creative performance in noise.” Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 381. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00381 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00381

Banbury, S. P., & Berry, D. C. (1998). “Disruption of office-related tasks by speech and office noise.” British Journal of Psychology, 89(3), 499-517. doi:10.1111/j.2044-8295.1998.tb02699.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.1998.tb02699.x

Jahncke, H., Björkeholm, P., Marsh, J. E., Odelius, J., & Sörqvist, P. (2016). “Office noise: Can headphones and masking sound attenuate distraction by background speech?” Work. doi:10.3233/wor-162421 https://doi.org/10.3233/wor-162421

Szalma, J. L., & Hancock, P. A. (2011). “Noise effects on human performance: A meta-analytic synthesis.” Psychological Bulletin, 137(4), 682-707. doi:10.1037/a0023987 https://doi.org/10.1037/a0023987