Is it me or have restaurants tended to become louder and louder? We are surrounded by a myriad of audio inputs constantly throughout the day. Back in my day when I went to a restaurant there used to be a respite from that stream of audio. Not any more! Restaurants concepts of varying ilk have adopted a loud plasma TV, music feed mentality that interrupts basic conversation. The moving images on the TV distract your eyes because we have inherited a survival trait to observe movement. It is fine if you’re on the savannah and need to determine whether to fight or take flight, however the same trait is very distracting when your eating lunch at a restaurant and your gaze continually shifts to the moving images on the TV.
Municipalities have noticed and some are enacting laws to lower the volume in eating establishments. Eating as a process does not require high decibel accompaniment, or does it? Perhaps we have evolved further and now we are not capable of eating with continual audio/video inputs.
