What if the key to your focus isn’t silence—but the right kind of noise?
In this episode, Chance shares how blasting Metallica in a chaotic dorm room actually saved his grades, why his wife’s brain thrives on TV reruns, and how that paradox connects to a surprising principle in AI.
You’ll walk away seeing your own “focus quirks” in a completely different light.
AI & The Art of the Possible — Learning About AI Through Stories, Not Specs
Hosted by Chance Sassano
The Heavy Metal Music Moment Full Transcript
I lived in a noisy dorm room in college.
Thin walls, loud neighbors, music bleeding from three rooms away, people coming and going at all hours.
I’d sit there with my textbook open and get nothing done.
My grades started slipping.
I hated it, but I couldn’t make my brain cooperate.
So I tried what everyone tells you to do.
I found the quietest corner of the library. No music, no people, just silence.
And my brain, it got even louder.
One night out of frustration, I tried something different.
I put on headphones, cranked up Metallica.
Loud, heavy, fast, and suddenly, I could focus.
Pages started turning. Papers got written.
That semester, my grades actually went up.
The chaos outside didn’t stop, but now I had my chaos, and my brain could work with that.
Years later, I met my wife and watched her do the exact opposite.
She studied with the TV on, sitcoms, dramas, plot twists, commercials, dialogue flying every second.
Her brain just filtered it out, turned it into background noise.
If I tried to study like that, I’d be following the plot, not the pages.
And if she tried to focus to Metallica blasting, she’d lose her mind. We both needed noise to focus, just completely different kinds.
I’m Chance, and this is AI and the Art of the Possible
EP 07: The Heavy Metal Music Moment
I’m Chance Sasano, and this is the Art of the Possible, where I reveal which AI breakthroughs are changing everything, and which ones we’re getting wrong.
For a long time, I thought one of us must be doing it wrong.
I mean, focus is supposed to look like a quiet library, right?
Not Metallica in a dorm room, not ER reruns in the background. Same goal, deep work, completely opposite noise settings. But here’s what finally clicked. We were both using noise as fuel, we just had completely different filters.
For me, silence is under-stimulation. My brain starts to invent distractions to fill the void. Flood the room with complex music, fast drums, changing riffs, and my brain finally has enough friction to grip the road. All that chaos turned into a steady, energetic hum behind the work.
My wife’s brain wants a different texture, narrative. Characters arguing, plot twists, loud ads. Her brain flattens it into static and she gets things done. What fuels my attention overwhelms hers. What calms her brain scrambles mine.
Okay, so this isn’t a cute relationship story.
There’s a name for what’s happening in our brain, stochastic resonance.
Think of a faint image in the dark. It’s too dim to see. Add a layer of static grain, noise, and suddenly the contrast pops. A little noise can help a weak signal stand out. Too little noise, and the system is underpowered. Too much noise, and it’s overwhelmed.
In one study with kids who have ADHD, researchers added steady white noise. The inattentive kids performed better on tasks. The kids who were already pretty attentive, their performance got worse with the same noise. Same noise, two groups, opposite results.
Every brain has its optimal noise level.
For me, it was Metallica in a dorm room. For my wife, it was TV dialogue she could safely ignore.
What works for one person can wreck focus for another.
So what does all of this have to do with AI?
For decades, we tried to scrub noise out of AI data, clean the signal, remove the randomness.
Perfect inputs.
Then researchers built neural networks with stochastic resonance neurons. Neurons that didn’t just tolerate noise, they use it. In one set of experiments, these networks hit dramatically higher accuracy, up to 25 times better in some low signal cases by tuning the noise instead of fighting it. Vision models that struggled with faint, low contrast images, they actually improved when researchers added controlled noise to the pictures. The noisy image helped the network see what was missing.
Brains and AI don’t just survive noise.
Sometimes they need it.
So here’s what I learned.
Noise isn’t the enemy of focus.
The wrong noise is.
For you, the right noise might be silence or rain sounds or a lo-fi playlist, or like me, loud heavy metal music. Your brain has a unique noise profile. We spend a lot of time trying to eliminate noise. Quiet offices, distraction-free apps, perfectly clean datasets.
But what if the goal isn’t to eliminate noise?
It’s to find the right kind of noise.
To embrace the chaos, not too much, not too little, just enough to make the signal clear. Next time you’re struggling to focus, don’t just chase silence. Ask a better question. What kind of noise works best with my brain? Give it a try sometime. You just might be surprised at the results, because once you see the noise as a feature you can tune and not a bug that you should fear, you start to unlock a different kind of intelligence, in yourself and in the way you use AI.
I’m Chance Sasano. Thanks for listening to AI and the Art of the Possible.
If this explains your focus style, send it to someone in your life who drives you crazy with theirs, and see if it changes how you both think about each other.
Next episode, millions of people prefer talking to AI over real people. So ChatGPT started telling them to stop.
The Go Find Your People Moment on AI and the Art of the Possible.
