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Your favourite rock band where you sing along to all the lyrics for example is not a good choice.

You can also use music to break up your study time. It's great for example to study for 40 minutes with music then 30 minutes without, each time you make a shift it will seem like a fresh study period and can actually help you study more effectively for longer.

Musicians achieve a higher grade point average (GPA) than non-musicians in the same school do. Music students achieve higher ACT scores and other college entrance exam scores. In a recent study, 66% of music majors who apply to medical school are accepted, the highest percentage of any group. Only 44% of biochemistry majors are admitted. Findings indicate that music study uniquely enhances higher brain functions required for reading, mathematics, chess, science and engineering.

Music training enhances reading skills.  A study done with 1st grade children shows significantly higher reading scores with children receiving piano/music instruction than did the control group. (Hurwitz, I., Wolff, P.H., Bortnick, B.D. & Kokas, K. 1975) Music training dramatically enhances children’s abstract reasoning skills necessary for math and science.  A study with 3 and 4 year-olds indicated that children who received piano/keyboard training performed 34% higher on tests measuring spatial-temporal ability than the non-musical group. These findings indicate that music uniquely enhances higher brain functions required for mathematics, chess, science and engineering. (Psychologist Dr. Frances Rauscher of the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh and physicist Dr. Gordon Shaw of the University of California at Irvine in 1994)

Music training increases intelligence.  Scores on a puzzle task, designed to measure spatial reasoning ability, increased significantly during the period they (three and four-year-olds) received the music lessons. In a research report, ‘Music Increases Intelligence Report,’ Dr Shaw said the piano was the instrument of choice because its keyboard gave the children both a linear and audible representation of the relationship between sounds. "What this means for parents is that they should consider giving their children piano lessons as early as age three or four," said Shaw. (College of Computing, Georgia Tech, August 24, 1994. UCI Journal, Spring 1997) Music enhances learning and creativity.  In another research test involving four and five-year olds, the effects of music on learning and creativity was measured. After twenty days of training, the music/dance group showed the greatest improvement in learning about body parts and creativity. (Mohanty, B. & Hejmadi, A. (1992). Effects Of Intervention Training on Some Cognitive Abilities of Preschool Children. Psychological Studies, 37, 31-37.)

Video games help focus on fine detail From: The Australian February 13, 2007 12:00AM Increase Text Size Decrease Text Size Print Email Share Add to Digg Add to del.icio.us Add to Facebook Add to Kwoff Add to Myspace Add to Newsvine What are these? PLAYING video games that involve high levels of visual action on a daily basis can improve your ability to see fine detail, a study shows. Researchers at the University of Rochester in the US have found that people who played action video games for a few hours a day over the course of a month sharpened their ability to identify letters by about 20 per cent. "Action video game play changes the way our brains process visual information," says Daphne Bavelier, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the university. "After just 30 hours, players showed a substantial increase in the spatial resolution of their vision, meaning they could see figures like those on an eye chart more clearly, even when other symbols crowded in."

PLAYING video games that involve high levels of visual action on a daily basis can improve your ability to see fine detail, a study shows. Researchers at the University of Rochester in the US have found that people who played action video games for a few hours a day over the course of a month sharpened their ability to identify letters by about 20 per cent. "Action video game play changes the way our brains process visual information," says Daphne Bavelier, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the university.

These games push the human visual system to the limits and the brain adapts to it," she says. "That learning carries over into other activities and possibly everyday life."

Classical music has been widely touted as favorable to intelligence. According to Sylvan Learning centers, studies indicate that soft, classical musical aids in concentration, and, according to Scholastic, studies also indicate that classical music stimulates the section of the brain used in math.

Loud music with words can often be more distracting than beneficial if you are trying to study.

Boys who received a game system at the beginning of the study showed an immediate increase in how much time they spent playing video games and a decrease in the after-school academic activities.  They also had significantly lower reading and writing scores than the group of boys that were promised a game system at the end of the study.  Parents reported no behavioral changes, but there was an immediate increase in teacher-reported learning problems for boys that received a game system at the beginning of the study (Science Daily).

The Workplace Doctors site details both sides of the question. In one study, University of Illinois researchers found that listening to music in "all types of work" increased work output 6.3% over a control group. In another study (dissected at MetaFilter), 56 employees working on basic computer tasks were found to be more productive when there was no music playing over the same period tested with music.

The most often cited study into the question of music's effect on the mind involves the so-called Mozart effect, which suggests that listening to certain kinds of music—Amadeus Wolfgang's classical works, in particular—impacts and boosts one's spatial-temporal reasoning, or the ability to think out long-term, more abstract solutions to logical problems that arise.

Researchers in Hamilton, Ohio, documented that students participating in a string pullout program scored higher on the reading, mathematics and citizenship portions of the Ohio Proficiency Test (OPT), than their non-music peers.

This study paired string and non-music students based on their verbal Cognitive Abilities Test (COGAT). Four groups of string students were released two times a week for instruction. Two of those four groups scored significantly higher on the reading and mathematics portion of the OPT than their non-music peers. Additionally, 68% of string students scored at grade level or higher on all four sections of the test compared to 58% of the non-music students. For more information (Michael D. Wallick, Ohio City Schools)

SAT scores of students who took part in music instruction surpassed students with no music training. Data collected from students taking the SAT, indicated that students taking music and arts averaged scores that were higher than non music students by 60 points on the verbal section and 43 points on the math section.

Why? Well, altruism, they note, is a component of human social behavior.  But it carries a personal cost. You give that last piece of pie to someone else and that means it doesn’t go to you. Human beings, therefore, might be tuned to constantly gauge how they’re morally measuring up, and not lay on the niceness any thicker than it needs to be.

The study does beg one age-old question: Which came first? Do kids think better of themselves because they're involved in sports, or do they get involved in sports because they already have higher self-esteem? "It's difficult to swoop into a one-time study and then determine whether the kids have better self-esteem to begin with," says McHale.

And while the researchers found a strong relationship between video games and lower grade point averages, playing video games did not appear to affect math skills and had a positive relationship with visual-spatial skills. These skills – in which a child learns visually, by thinking in pictures and images – are considered the “training wheels” for performance in science, technology, engineering and math.

In the economics literature, Andreoni and Vesterlund (2001) seminal study demonstrated that the question of “Who is more generous?” is complicated. Their study differences in the “demand curves for altruism” where men are more responsive to the price of giving (pg. 1). They conclude that men are more generous when it is cheap to give, but women are more generous when it is more expensive to give.

education

religions,

While a number of studies have associated lower grades with students who listen to rap or heavy metal music, one study found that white students actually improved their academic abilities after watching rap videos, as well as expressing more progressive attitudes—after watching politically focused rap videos, they were more inclined to support a liberal black political candidate. Unfortunately, there was no indication of similar research being conducted with black students.