Would you ignore him too?

On your daily morning commute to your office/school/home, you hear some exceptional music being played at your Metro station subway. Would you stop to listen to him or go on and catch the daily 7:10 before it leaves? ... Would your answer change if I told you that the musician was one of the greatest violinist of our time performing on his $3.5 million dollar worth Stradivarius handcrafted in 1713? You can read the full story on the experiment conducted by Gene Weingarten of Washington Post here.The violinist was none other than Joshua Bell, also the recipient of the coveted Avery Fisher prize for this year.
Seth Godin says that he'd ignore him too. He uses the story to prove the prior knowledge of marketers about context, permission and worldview, what some of us may call 'perception'. But Seth is also bothered (and apologetic) like most people who read the story. As per Gene, this story got the largest and most global response of anything he has ever written, for any publication. You can read some of the responses here. Seth is apologetic because he feels that marketers have created a lot more noise instead of trust and it is this noise that makes us ignore truly beautiful things.

I believe it goes beyond that. I think the noise not only makes us ignore beautiful things, it is making us oblivious of truly beautiful experiences. Gene writes "...the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away". Perhaps this is not statistically significant but it does make me suspect that many of us have lost our natural ability to enjoy beautiful experiences. What can we do to regain the ability? Can the kids help us? What can we do to reduce noise and build trust?