When I was still working as a professor, I didn’t spend much time in the university library. I worked in my office or at what might seem strange to some in a campus coffee shop that was just across the street. I continue to do this even after I have retired.
My wife never complained about my coffee shop thing even though when we are staying in lake country I sometimes I now drive about 10 miles to my shop. “I have to go to work,” I say. It turns out that there is actually some benefit to this habit. I happened across this article describing what some call the coffee shop effect. It appears that the benefits of low-level noise and distraction seem a benefit to the creative process, but might not be the best environment for learning. Somehow, this makes sense to me.
Here are the abstracts from a couple of studies cited in the article.
Mehta, R., Zhu, R., & Cheema, A. (2012). Is noise always bad? Exploring the effects of ambient noise on creative cognition. Journal of Consumer Research, 39(4), 784-799.
This paper examines how ambient noise, an important environmental variable, can affect creativity. Results from five experiments demonstrate that a moderate (70 dB) versus low (50 dB) level of ambient noise enhances performance on creative tasks and increases the buying likelihood of innovative products. A high level of noise (85 dB), on the other hand, hurts creativity. Process measures reveal that a moderate (vs. low) level of noise increases processing difficulty, inducing a higher construal level and thus promoting abstract processing, which subsequently leads to higher creativity. A high level of noise, however, reduces the extent of information processing and thus impairs creativity.
Nielsen, E. G. (2015). The coffee shop effect: investigating the relationship between ambient noise and cognitive flexibility. (thesis)
This work suggests that noise may be beneficial for creativity but not for learning. Further research is needed to clarify the effect that ambient noise has on cognitive flexibility as it applies to other, non-learning-based tasks