Yes, but I'd argue that would be an argument in favor of open offices - overhearing things that are relevant to you and/or you have knowledge of allows you to jump into the conversation and participate.
What if the relevant conversation is the 6th nearest? Uh Oh!
My point is that open office doesn't really help because you can only really pay attention to the people relatively close to you and then only X conversations at a time anyway (for me, X is usually 1). Any other conversations happening anywhere else, I will miss.
Better would be a "remote work friendly" culture where discussions happen in slack or somewhere async like that. You can then check it when you're not trying to focus and you won't miss things simply because of proximity. Best of all, you don't get distracted from your actual work when you try to focus.
> Why would I ever need to focus on anything at work?
Exactly... better not do any work so you can pay full attention to what everybody else is doing, in case something is relevant to what you're not doing...