Brandon Keim, reporting for Wired Science:
According to a new study, listeners notice those conversations more than dialogue between two people. It’s a seemingly involuntary response. There’s just something attention-demanding about hearing one person on a phone.
The next question is whether those demands affect how we think, even pulling a curtain of cognitive impairment across a cellphone-suffused civilization.
For such a mundane thing, overheard cell phone conversations are revealing a lot about the way our minds work.