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music can help you concentrate in certain work areas but if your not careful it can also create a distraction. when you do your school work for example you can put a little background music on , the background music can help some people focus by cancelling out all the background noise and people talking. some music though, can be distracting by the loudness and song choice which can hinder you from the learning process.

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Many people listen to music while they’re carrying out a task, whether they’re studying for an exam, driving a vehicle or even reading a book. Many of these people argue that background music helps them focus.

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how music can distract  and sometimes help your brain

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how music can distract  and sometimes help your brain

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Does music really help you concentrate? | Education | The Guardian

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Does music really help you concentrate? | Education | The Guardian

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this source is really good for its imagry and pictures on how music can help you consentrate.

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any people listen to music while they're carrying out a task, whether they're studying for an exam, driving a vehicle or even reading a book. Many of these people argue that background music helps them focus.

Why, though? When you think about it, that doesn't make much sense. Why would having two things to concentrate on make you more focused, not less? Some people even go so far as to say that not having music on is more distracting. So what's going on there?

It's not clear why the brain likes music so much in the first place, although it clearly does. Interestingly, there's a specific spectrum of musical properties that the brain prefers. Experiments by Maria Witek and colleagues reveal that there needs to be a medium level of syncopation in music to elicit a pleasure response and associated body movement in individuals. What this means in plain English is: music needs to be funky, but not too funky, for people to like it enough to make them want to dance.

Your own experience will probably back this up. Simple, monotonous beats, like listening to a metronome, aren't really entertaining. They have low levels of syncopation and certainly don't make you want to dance. In contrast, chaotic and unpredictable music, like free jazz, has high levels of syncopation, can be extremely off-putting and rarely, if ever, entices people to dance.

The middle ground ( funk music like James Brown is what the experimenters reference most) hits the sweet spot between predictable and chaotic, for which the brain has a strong preference. Most modern pop falls somewhere within this range, no doubt.

Paying attention

Why would music help us concentrate, though? One argument is to do with attention.

For all its amazing abilities, the brain hasn't really evolved to take in abstract information or spend prolonged periods thinking about one thing. We seem to have two attention systems: a conscious one that enables us to direct our focus towards things we know we want to concentrate on and an unconscious one that shifts attention towards anything our senses pick up that might be significant. The unconscious one is simpler, more fundamental, and linked to emotional processing rather than higher reasoning. It also operates faster. So when you hear a noise when you're alone at home, you're paying attention to it long before you're able to work out what it might have been. You can't help it.

The trouble is, while our conscious attention is focused on the task in hand, the unconscious attention system doesn't shut down; it's still very much online, scanning for anything important in your peripheral senses. And if what we're doing is unpleasant or dull - so you're already having to force your attention to stay fixed on it - the unconscious attention system is even more potent. This means that a distraction doesn't need to be as stimulating to divert your attention on to something else.

Some ​people argue that one of the best music genres for concentration is the video game soundtrack

Have you ever worked in an open-plan office and been working on a very important task, only to be driven slowly mad by a co-worker constantly sniffing, or sipping their coffee, or clipping their nails? Something quite innocuous suddenly becomes much more infuriating when you're trying to work on something your brain doesn't necessarily enjoy.

Music is a very useful tool in such situations. It provides non-invasive noise and pleasurable feelings, to effectively neutralise the unconscious attention system's ability to distract us. It's much like giving small children a new toy to play with while you're trying to get some work done without them disturbing you.

Type of music

However, it's not just a matter of providing any old background noise to keep distractions at bay. A lot of companies have tried using pink noise (pdf) - a less invasive version of white noise - broadcasting it around the workplace to reduce distractions and boost productivity. But views on the effectiveness of this approach are mixed at best.

It seems clear that the type of noise, or music, is important. This may seem obvious: someone listening to classical music while they work wouldn't seem at all unusual, but if they were listening to thrash metal it would be thought very strange indeed.

While the nature and style of the music can cause specific responses in the brain (funky music compels you to dance, sad music makes you melancholy, motivational music makes you want to keep fit), some studies suggest that it really is down to personal preference. Music you like increases focus, while music you don't impedes it. Given the extreme variation in musical preferences from person to person, exposing your workforce or classroom to a single type of music would obviously end up with mixed results.

Music also has a big impact on mood - truly bleak music could sap your enthusiasm for your task. Something else to look out for is music with catchy lyrics. Musical pieces without wordsmight be better working companions, as human speech and vocalisation is something our brains pay particular attention to.

Video game soundtracks

Some people argue that one of the best music genres for concentration is the video game soundtrack. This makes sense, when you consider the purpose of the video game music: to help create an immersive environment and to facilitate but not distract from a task that requires constant attention and focus.

Limitations in the technology used for early games consoles meant the music also tended to be fairly simplistic in its melodies - think Tetris or Mario. In a somewhat Darwinian way, the music in video games has been refined over decades to be pleasant, entertaining, but not distracting. The composers have (probably unintentionally) been manipulating the attention systems in the brains of players for years now.

There are signs that, as technology progresses, this type of theme music is being abandoned, with games producers opting for anything from big orchestral pieces to hip-hop. The challenge will be to maintain the delicate balance of stimulation without distraction. To achieve this, games composers will need to stay focused. Which is ironic.
Dean Burnett's first book, The Idiot Brain, all about the weird and confusing properties of the brain, is available now in the UK and the US.

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any people listen to music while they're carrying out a task, whether they're studying for an exam, driving a vehicle or even reading a book. Many of these people argue that background music helps them focus. Why, though? When you think about it, that doesn't make much sense.

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If you're studying for a test, putting on background music that you like may seem like a good idea. But if you're trying to memorize a list in order - facts, numbers, elements of the periodic table - the music may actually be working against you, a new study suggests.Researchers at the University of Wales Institute in Cardiff, United Kingdom, looked at the ability to recall information in the presence of different sounds. They instructed 25 participants between ages 18 and 30 try to memorize, and later recall, a list of letters in order. The study authors are Nick Per-ham and Joanne Vizard, and the study will appear in the September 2010 issue of Applied Clinical Psychology.

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music brings your brain to a distraction off your work

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music brings your brain to a distraction off your work

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Studying for an exam while listening to music is not smart, because background music can impair your ability to perform memory tasks, new research has found.

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any of us listen to music while we work, thinking that it will help us to concentrate on the task at hand. And in fact, recent research has found that music can have beneficial effects on creativity. When it comes to other areas of performance, however, the impact of background music is more complicated.

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Music distracts brain, affects concentration | Health24

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Music distracts brain, affects concentration | Health24

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this source explains how music can distract you in a way where your more focused on the music then doing your work.

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Music distracts brain, affects concentration

Studying for an exam while listening to music is not smart, because background music can impair your ability to perform memory tasks, new research has found.

Studying for an exam while listening to music is not smart, because background music can impair your ability to perform memory tasks, new research has found.

The study

Study participants were asked to recall a list of eight consonants in the order they were presented. They did this while in five different sound environments: quiet surroundings; music they liked; music they disliked; changing state (a sequence of random digits); and steady state (a sequence of steady digits such as "3, 3, 3, 3").

The participants' recall ability was poorest when listening to music, regardless of whether they liked or disliked it, and in changing-state conditions. The most accurate recall occurred when participants performed the task in steady-state environments, according to the study published online in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology.

"The poorer performance of the music and changing-state sounds are due to the acoustical variation within those environments. This impairs the ability to recall the order of items, via rehearsal, within the presented list," explained lead researcher Nick Perham, a lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Wales Institute in Cardiff, in a news release from the journal's publisher.

The findings

"Mental arithmetic also requires the ability to retain order information in the short-term via rehearsal, and may be similarly affected by their performance in the presence of changing-state, background environments," he added.

When performing a challenging mental task, do it in silence, Perham recommended. (August 2010)

(Copyright © 2010 HealthDay. All rights reserved.)

Studying for an exam while listening to music is not smart, because background music can impair your ability to perform memory tasks, new research has found.

The study

Study participants were asked to recall a list of eight consonants in the order they were presented. They did this while in five different sound environments: quiet surroundings; music they liked; music they disliked; changing state (a sequence of random digits); and steady state (a sequence of steady digits such as "3, 3, 3, 3").

The participants' recall ability was poorest when listening to music, regardless of whether they liked or disliked it, and in changing-state conditions. The most accurate recall occurred when participants performed the task in steady-state environments, according to the study published online in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology.

"The poorer performance of the music and changing-state sounds are due to the acoustical variation within those environments. This impairs the ability to recall the order of items, via rehearsal, within the presented list," explained lead researcher Nick Perham, a lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Wales Institute in Cardiff, in a news release from the journal's publisher.

The findings

"Mental arithmetic also requires the ability to retain order information in the short-term via rehearsal, and may be similarly affected by their performance in the presence of changing-state, background environments," he added.

When performing a challenging mental task, do it in silence, Perham recommended. (August 2010)

(Copyright © 2010 HealthDay. All rights reserved.)

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Music distracts brain, affects concentration

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Studying for an exam while listening to music is not smart, because background music can impair your ability to perform memory tasks, new research has found. The study Study participants were asked to recall a list of eight consonants in the order they were presented.

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Music only helps you concentrate if you’re doing the right kind of task | Popular Science

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Music only helps you concentrate if you’re doing the right kind of task | Popular Science

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this source explains how music c can help you concentrate in some ways.

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Many of us listen to music while we work, thinking that it will help us to concentrate on the task at hand. And in fact, recent research has found that music can have beneficial effects on creativity. When it comes to other areas of performance, however, the impact of background music is more complicated.

The assumption that listening to music when working is beneficial to output likely has its roots in the so-called " Mozart effect", which gained wide media attention in the early 1990s. Put simply, this is the finding that spatial rotation performance (mentally rotating a 3D dimensional shape to determine whether it matches another or not) is increased immediately after listening to the music of Mozart, compared to relaxation instructions or no sound at all. Such was the attention that this finding garnered that the then US governor of Georgia, Zell Miller, proposed giving free cassettes or CDs of Mozart's music to prospective parents.

Subsequent studies have cast doubt on the necessity of the music of Mozart to produce this effect - a " Schubert effect", a " Blur effect", and even a " Stephen King effect" (his audiobook rather than his singing) have all been observed. In addition, musicians could show the effect purely from imagining the music rather than actually listening to it.

So researchers then suggested that the "Mozart effect" was not due to his music as such, but rather to people's optimum levels of mood and arousal. And so it became the " mood and arousal effect."

Unfortunately, the situations in which most mood and arousal effects are observed are slightly unrealistic. Do we really sit and listen to music, switch it off, and then engage in our work in silence? More likely is that we work with our favorite tunes playing in the background.

How sound affects performance has been the topic of laboratory research for over 40 years, and is observed through a phenomenon called the irrelevant sound effect. Basically, this effect means that performance is poorer when a task is undertaken in the presence of background sound (irrelevant sound that you are ignoring), in comparison to quiet.

To study irrelevant sound effect, participants are asked to complete a simple task which requires them to recall a series of numbers or letters in the exact order in which they saw them - similar to trying to memorize a telephone number when you have no means to write it down. In general, people achieve this by rehearsing the items either aloud or under their breath. The tricky thing is being able to do this while ignoring any background noise.

Two key characteristics of the irrelevant sound effect are required for its observation. First, the task must require the person to use their rehearsal abilities, and second, the sound must contain acoustical variation - for example, sounds such as "n, r, p" as opposed to "c, c, c". Where the sound does not vary much acoustically, then performance of the task is much closer to that observed in quiet conditions. Interestingly, it does not matter whether the person likes the sound or not. Performance is equally as poor whether the background sound is music the person likes or dislikes.

The irrelevant sound effect itself comes 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.

What this all means is that 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 maximize 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 in order 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 children who are being musically trained show an improvement in intellectual abilities. However, the reasons behind this are, at present, unknown and likely to be complex. It may not be the music per se that produces this effect but more the activities associated with studying music, such as concentration, repeated practice, lessons and homework.
Nick Perham is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Cardiff Metropolitan University. This article was originally published on The Conversation.

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Music only helps you concentrate if you're doing the right kind of task

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Many of us listen to music while we work, thinking that it will help us to concentrate on the task at hand. And in fact, recent research has found that music can have beneficial effects on creativity. When it comes to other areas of performance, however, the impact of background music is more complicated.

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Music may harm your studying, study says – The Chart - CNN.com Blogs

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Music may harm your studying, study says – The Chart - CNN.com Blogs

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this source explains how music can distract you in ether by blasting the music too loud or enjoy the music instead of do your work.

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If you're studying for a test, putting on background music that you like may seem like a good idea. But if you're trying to memorize a list in order - facts, numbers, elements of the periodic table - the music may actually be working against you, a new study suggests.

Researchers at the University of Wales Institute in Cardiff, United Kingdom, looked at the ability to recall information in the presence of different sounds. They instructed 25 participants between ages 18 and 30 try to memorize, and later recall, a list of letters in order. The study authors are Nick Perham and Joanne Vizard, and the study will appear in the September 2010 issue of Applied Clinical Psychology.

Participants were tested under various listening conditions: quiet, music that they'd said they liked, music that they'd said they didn't like, a voice repeating the number three, and a voice reciting random single-digit numbers.

The study found that participants performed worst while listening to music, regardless of whether they liked that music, and to the speech of random numbers. They did the best in the quiet and while listening to the repeated "three."

Music may impair cognitive abilities in these scenarios because if you're trying to memorize things in order, you may get thrown off by the changing words and notes in your chosen song, the authors speculate.

Although other studies have found benefits to listening to music before performing a task, the authors note that this new research presents a more realistic scenario: hearing music at the same time as doing the expected task.

In the 1990s, listening to the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was thought to increase spatial abilities, but subsequent research failed to find the same effect. But other studies have found a "Schubert effect" for people who like the music of Franz Schubert, and a "Stephen King" effect for people who liked a narrated story by that author. The explanation for all of this could be that when you hear something you like, it heightens your arousal and mood, which improves performance, Perham and Vizard note.

The new study does not necessarily contradict those previous findings, but does suggests some limitations on the benefits of music in memorizing lists of things in order, the authors wrote. It may still be the case that listening to music before performing a task like that helps cognitive abilities. But this new research suggests that it might be better to study for an exam in quiet, or listen to music beforehand.

Still, given the small sample size, the study provides only preliminary results that need to be further explored in other experiments.

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elizabeth landau - cnn.com health writer/producer

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Music may harm your studying, study says

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If you're studying for a test, putting on background music that you like may seem like a good idea. But if you're trying to memorize a list in order -- facts, numbers, elements of the periodic table -- the music may actually be working against you, a new study suggests.