Music only helps you concentrate if you're doing the right kind of task - 1 views
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Lara Cowell on 25 Nov 18Nick Perham, a psychology researcher who conducted a major study on music and reading comprehension, gives a summary of music's effect on productivity. Whether it is beneficial or not is dependent on task and the timing of the music.While recent research has found that music can have beneficial effects on creativity, with other areas of performance, the impact of background music is more complicated. Performance is poorer when a task is undertaken in the presence of background sound (irrelevant sound that you are ignoring), in comparison to quiet: this is known as the irrelevant sound effect. The irrelevant sound effect phenomenon arises from attempting to process two sources of ordered information at the same time - one from the task and one from the sound. Unfortunately, only the former is required to successfully perform the serial recall task, and the effort expended in ensuring that irrelevant order information from the sound is not processed actually impedes this ability. A similar conflict is also seen when reading while in the presence of lyrical music. In this situation, the two sources of words - from the task and the sound - are in conflict. The subsequent cost is poorer performance of the task in the presence of music with lyrics. It doesn't matter whether one likes the music or not--performance was equally poor. Whether having music playing in the background helps or hinders performance depends on the task and on the type of music, and only understanding this relationship will help people maximise their productivity levels. If the task requires creativity or some element of mental rotation, then listening to music one likes can increase performance. In contrast, if the task requires one to rehearse information, then quiet is best, or, in the case of reading comprehension, quiet or instrumental music. One promising area of the impact of music on cognitive abilities stems from actually learning to play a musical instrument. Studies show that child