Communications elements by Isnaldo Piñero Isnaldo Piñero magazine | Page 5

Psychological noise is what happens when your thoughts occupy your attention while you are
hearing, or reading, a message. Imagine that it is 4:45 p.m. and your boss, who is at a meeting in
another city, e-mails you asking for last month’s sales figures, an analysis of current sales
projections, and the sales figures from the same month for the past five years. You may open the
e-mail, start to read, and think, “Great—no problem—I have those figures and that analysis right
here in my computer.” You fire off a reply with last month’s sales figures and the current
projections attached. Then, at five o’clock, you turn off your computer and go home. The next
morning, your boss calls on the phone to tell you he was inconvenienced because you neglected to
include the sales figures from the previous years. What was the problem? Interference: by
thinking about how you wanted to respond to your boss’s message, you prevented yourself from
reading attentively enough to understand the whole message.
Interference can come from other sources, too. Perhaps you are hungry, and your attention to
your current situation interferes with your ability to listen. Maybe the office is hot and stuffy. If
you were a member of an audience listening to an executive speech, how could this impact your
ability to listen and participate?
Noise interferes with normal encoding and decoding of the message carried by the channel
between source and receiver. Not all noise is bad, but noise interferes with the communication
process. For example, your cell phone ringtone may be a welcome noise to you, but it may
interrupt the communication process in class and bother your classmates.