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The pulse and rhythm of music keeps the brain active and helps it pay attention over longer periods of time vs. no music.

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The researchers caught glimpses of the brain in action using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, which gives a dynamic image showing which parts of the brain are working during a given activity. The goal of the study was to look at how the brain sorts out events, but the research also revealed that musical techniques used by composers 200 years ago help the brain organize incoming information.

"In a concert setting, for example, different individuals listen to a piece of music with wandering attention, but at the transition point between movements, their attention is arrested," said the paper's senior author Vinod Menon, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and of neurosciences.

"I'm not sure if the baroque composers would have thought of it in this way, but certainly from a modern neuroscience perspective, our study shows that this is a moment when individual brains respond in a tightly synchronized manner," Menon said.

The team used music to help study the brain's attempt to make sense of the continual flow of information the real world generates, a process called event segmentation. The brain partitions information into meaningful chunks by extracting information about beginnings, endings and the boundaries between events.

"These transitions between musical movements offer an ideal setting to study the dynamically changing landscape of activity in the brain during this segmentation process," said Devarajan Sridharan, a neurosciences graduate student trained in Indian percussion and first author of the article.

No previous study, to the researchers' knowledge, has directly addressed the question of event segmentation in the act of hearing and, specifically, in music. To explore this area, the team chose pieces of music that contained several movements, which are self-contained sections that break a single work into segments. They chose eight symphonies by the English late-baroque period composer William Boyce (1711-79), because his music has a familiar style but is not widely recognized, and it contains several well-defined transitions between relatively short movements.

The study focused on movement transitions - when the music slows down, is punctuated by a brief silence and begins the next movement. These transitions span a few seconds and are obvious to even a non-musician - an aspect critical to their study, which was limited to participants with no formal music training.

The researchers attempted to mimic the everyday activity of listening to music, while their subjects were lying prone inside the large, noisy chamber of an MRI machine. Ten men and eight women entered the MRI scanner with noise-reducing headphones, with instructions to simply listen passively to the music.

In the analysis of the participants' brain scans, the researchers focused on a 10-second window before and after the transition between movements. They identified two distinct neural networks involved in processing the movement transition, located in two separate areas of the brain. They found what they called a "striking" difference between activity levels in the right and left sides of the brain during the entire transition, with the right side significantly more active.

In this foundational study, the researchers conclude that dynamic changes seen in the fMRI scans reflect the brain's evolving responses to different phases of a symphony. An event change - the movement transition signaled by the termination of one movement, a brief pause, followed by the initiation of a new movement - activates the first network, called the ventral fronto-temporal network. Then a second network, the dorsal fronto-parietal network, turns the spotlight of attention to the change and, upon the next event beginning, updates working memory.

"The study suggests one possible adaptive evolutionary purpose of music," said Jonathan Berger, PhD, associate professor of music and a musician who is another co-author of the study. Music engages the brain over a period of time, he said, and the process of listening to music could be a way that the brain sharpens its ability to anticipate events and sustain attention.

According to the researchers, their findings expand on previous functional brain imaging studies of anticipation, which is at the heart of the musical experience. Even non-musicians are actively engaged, at least subconsciously, in tracking the ongoing development of a musical piece, and forming predictions about what will come next. Typically in music, when something will come next is known, because of the music's underlying pulse or rhythm, but what will occur next is less known, they said.

Having a mismatch between what listeners expect to hear vs. what they actually hear - for example, if an unrelated chord follows an ongoing harmony - triggers similar ventral regions of the brain. Once activated, that region partitions the deviant chord as a different segment with distinct boundaries.

The results of the study "may put us closer to solving the cocktail party problem - how it is that we are able to follow one conversation in a crowded room of many conversations," said one of the co-authors, Daniel Levitin, PhD, a music psychologist from McGill University who has written a popular book called This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession.

Chris Chafe, PhD, the Duca Family Professor of Music at Stanford, also contributed to this work. This research was supported by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the National Science Foundation, the Ben and A. Jess Shenson Fund, the National Institutes of Health and a Stanford graduate fellowship. The fMRI analysis was performed at the Stanford Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience Laboratory.

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Music moves brain to pay attention, Stanford study finds

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The researchers caught glimpses of the brain in action using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, which gives a dynamic image showing which parts of the brain are working during a given activity.

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The music genre matters, and some genres may hinder your ability to focus while reading or writing especially music with lyrics because it may clash with your internal voice.

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However, it's important to listen to the right types of music, as some can hinder your progress while others will help you move along at a faster pace. Some types of music just aren't designed for the office.

These tend to include songs with lyrics, complex musical sounds, or forms of music that you don't normally put on your playlist. Music can also distract if it's imposed upon you.

That said, there's music out there that has been proven to help people at work. In fact, some types are specifically designed with productivity in mind. Let's look at some tried-and-tested types of music and how they can help you create better work.

1. Classical Music

When we think of classical music, composers such as Bach, Vivaldi, and Handel come up in our thoughts. In a study, seven out of eight radiologists found that baroque music increased mood and concentration on their work. If you're looking for where to begin, try Vivaldi's quick-tempo Four Seasons or Bach's Brandenburg Concertos.

2. Nature Music

Listening to the sounds of nature can enhance cognitive function and concentration. Soothing sounds, such as flowing water, rainfall, and rustling leaves, work well, while jarring noises such as birdcalls and animal noises can be distracting. Some forms of nature music include instruments, such as piano or flute, which aid in creating a suitable atmosphere for work. I listen to babbling brooks and waves crashing when I need a moment to relax during stressful work periods.

3. Epic Music

Epic music can make you feel like you're doing something grandiose to change the world. Think trailer music for adventure and action movies.

It empowers and lifts you up. So, if you're feeling tired and uninspired during your workday, try listening to some "epic music" (yes, it's really called that) to give you that extra boost of motivation. I turn to epic music when it's late and I need an energy boost to keep working on a project.

4. Video Game Music

Music from video games is a great choice because the compositions are specifically designed to enhance your gaming experience. After all, it's pretty crucial you dodge that fire, or skillfully maneuver your way through hordes of enemies. For starters, try the Bastion soundtrack, or one of the SimCity soundtracks, to name a few.

5. Ambient Soundtracks

If you're feeling stressed out at work, give ambient music a try. As Brian Eno, creator of Music for Airports says, "Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting." Ambient music is effective for those difficult work moments, so that you can push through your work and stay sane in the process.

Other Types of Music

There's a number of other types of music you can listen to during work, such as meditation music, blues, or jazz, to name a few. If you just want to silence your chatty co-workers or the nearby printer, use "white noise" to cancel them out.

Experiment and see what works. Soft and mellow may help you to focus on your work, while a high energy piece can keep you motivated.

And of course, there are those times when silence is golden.

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5 Types of Music That Increase Your Productivity

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However, it's important to listen to the right types of music, as some can hinder your progress while others will help you move along at a faster pace. Some types of music just aren't designed for the office. These tend to include songs with lyrics, complex musical sounds, or forms of music that you don't normally put on your playlist.

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Listening to music while studying, reading or writing is not for people who cant multitask, but can be beneficial for certain people especially people who get anxious during school activities. Listening to music also releases dopamine which could create a positive feeling between listening to music and school work and may encourage people to work harder for longer more frequently.

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It's fair to to say the majority of students prefer to study while listening to music. Whether frantically cramming some last-minute reading to Kanye, or finalising an essay to the sound of the Arctic Monkeys, go to any university or college library and the majority of students there will be listening to their music of choice.

Music is a very significant part of our daily lives; the image of the quietly-focused student isolating themselves into a personal study zone has led to interest into whether listening to music actually helps studies or not. Research into the field has proven fairly ambiguous, with many studies contradicting each other. However this does provide an useful insight for students who maybe looking into ways to use music to enhance their exam performance.

The most famous theory linking music and cognitive performance is the 'Mozart effect', the popular idea that listening to Mozart makes you smarter. The research itself was interested in the relation between Mozart and 'spatial-temporal reasoning', or knowing how to fit things into other things, basically. The idea that music - particularly classical - can improve exam results has endured, with websites such mozarteffect.com selling music supposedly designed to "charge the brain."

However, research has shown that performance in tasks involving memory and concentration was better in a silent environment, though, studying in place often disturbed by talkers, sneezers, or traffic, few students have access to a silent study space. Subjects tested in environments with background music were found to get better results than those tested against background noise. Therefore, taking along an iPod and a set of headphones may come in handy if you're looking to avoid being distracted by any ambient sounds.

The style, volume, rhythm and 'state' of the music a student listens to, as well as the personality of the student, can also be significant factors. Classical music is generally viewed as the best to listen to whilst studying, however there is no decisive research to back this. What has been proven is that listening to music which is constant in state, has a steady a repetitive pulse, and is not too loud is better for concentration than inconsistent musical styles, meaning you should probably avoid listening to anything labelled 'Mathcore' when trying to be productive. The same study also found evidence that people perform worse when listening to their preferred, rather than neutral, music.

Personality has also been shown to affect performance, with introverts more likely to test worse than extroverts. Similarly, people tested who are bad at multi-tasking have also been shown to test worse when listening to background music. For those who feel the pressure during exams, it has been observed that calming music, for example a Haydn string quartet, can help to reduce anxiety in an individual.

This highlights the main thing to consider when listening to music while studying: that how you do so really just depends on you. There is no decisive doctrine or absolute piece of research which tells you what to do, whether it's a Four Tet Boiler Room set or Cannibal Corpse you think helps you to study, do what you believe helps. Listening to music has been shown to cause the release of dopamine, meaning that it is a pleasurable, rewarding experience which can relax an individual.

On the whole, what a student can take from research is that using music to create an environment yourself is conducive towards the task you wish to complete.

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How music could help you to concentrate on work

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It's fair to to say the majority of students prefer to study while listening to music. Whether frantically cramming some last-minute reading to Kanye, or finalising an essay to the sound of the Arctic Monkeys, go to any university or college library and the majority of students there will be listening to their music of choice.

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"The Mozart effect" is not real and listening to classical music does not actually increase your intelligence however it may help reduce stress and anxiety in students while studying. However lyrical or hard music may negate the beneficial effects of listening to music while doing something that requires focus.

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Benefits of Studying with Music

More and more, students are bringing headphones with them to libraries and study halls. But does it actually help to listen to music when studying? While the so-called 'Mozart effect', a term coined from a study that suggested listening to music could actually enhance intelligence, has been widely refuted, there are still many benefits of listening to music while studying:

Music that is soothing and relaxing can help students to beat stress or anxiety while studying.

Background music may improve focus on a task by providing motivation and improving mood. During long study sessions, music can aid endurance.

In some cases, students have found that music helps them with memorization, likely by creating a positive mood, which indirectly boosts memory formation.

Drawbacks of Listening to Music while Studying

And still, despite these benefits, studies have shown that music is often times more distracting than it is helpful.

Students who listen to music with lyrics while completing reading or writing tasks tend to be less efficient and come away having absorbed less information.

Loud or agitated music can have adverse effects on reading comprehension and on mood, making focus more difficult.

Students who use music to help them memorize sometimes need to listen to music while taking the test in order to reap the benefits of this study method. In the silent test-taking environment, these students may find it more difficult to recall the information.

Ultimately, the effects of music on study habits are dependent on the student and their style of learning. If easily distracted, students should most likely avoid music so they can keep their focus on their work. Conversely, students who function better as multi-taskers may find that music helps them to better concentrate.

Building Better Study Habits

If you're wondering how to improve your memory and study skills, Study.com offers course materials on cognitive perspectives and cognition that include training on improving short- and long-term memory, retrieving memories and forming better study habits.

These resources feature fast and convenient video lessons that can be viewed in about five minutes, plus lesson quizzes to check your comprehension of the material. You'll also find a jump feature that lets you return to key points in each video or skip through info you already know about.

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is it good to listen to music while studying? | study.com

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Is it Good to Listen to Music While Studying? | Study.com

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More and more, students are bringing headphones with them to libraries and study halls. But does it actually help to listen to music when studying?