Recently, the British IVF pioneer Lord Robert Winston was sitting on a train traveling from London, England, to Manchester, when he found himself becoming steadily enraged.

Winston is normally a fairly mild-mannered man, known for a big mustache and a friendly demeanor. But what was driving him slowly insane as the train rumbled through its two-hour journey was another passenger in particular. Ignoring the child with her, the woman had picked up her phone and begun what would become a very loud conversation, which would take place over several counties and be peppered with tedious facts and banal detail.

Lord Winston tried to ignore it. He did. But there is something fundamentally un-ignorable about a loud, one-sided conversation. Our brains fight to make sense of them, constantly jarred by sudden and randomly timed replies to sentences we can’t hear.

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