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Music does hinder your ability to retain information while studying.

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This source can supply me with more information about the human cognitive limitations that makes listening to music a mess in your brain

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This source can supply me with more information about the human cognitive limitations that makes listening to music a mess in your brain

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Headphones can seem ubiquitous in a college library, a function of responsible students' attempts to isolate themselves from the conversations and noises around them. However, another form of distraction may be coming right up those cables, and for some, it may be time to face the music -- or more specifically, the lyrics.

"Music with lyrics is very likely to have a problematic effect when you're writing or reading," said Clifford Nass, professor at Stanford University. "Probably less of an effect on math, if you're not using the language parts of your brain."

Music has a profound impact on our state of being, altering everything from mood to heart rate. It can energize or depress us. Medium levels of arousal are ideal for studying -- not too agitated and not too relaxed -- and music can also be an effective tool in leading students to that level.

"Imagine trying to learn something while you're on a roller coaster," Nass said. "If you're feeling agitated, you can listen to more calming music, and that will absolutely have a positive effect."

Glenn Schellenberg, a professor in the psychology department at the University of Toronto, published a study that indicates fast, loud background music hinders reading comprehension.

"The reason why it's a mess is you have cognitive limitations. If you're doing two things at once you don't focus as well," he said. "On the other hand, we know that music changes how you feel, and often it can change how you feel in a positive way."

In other words, it seems carefully tailoring the music you listen to while studying, based on the subject matter and your mood, can help keep you focused -- so long as you stay away from lyrics while doing language-based work.

Music has always had its place at college, but as it has become more portable and high quality, it is reaching areas where it never used to take up residence.

"In my day, there was no way you could take music to the library," Nass said. "When [today's students] go to the library to study, they bring their noise, and music, with them."

In any case, music is very likely better than Facebook and Twitter, and in a world where multitasking has become extremely common because everything is on one device, some students find music helps keep them focused while studying.

"Especially when music doesn't have words, it can help me get into the reading and stop me getting distracted by other things," said Melanie Fineman, a junior at Brown University. "It makes studying more enjoyable."
Some more modern alternatives to the usual lyric-less Mozart: Sofia Castello y Tickell is a Fall 2012 USA TODAY Collegiate Correspondent. Learn more about her here. Follow her on Twitter. This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.
Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2KTCrnP

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Should you listen to music while you study?

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Headphones can seem ubiquitous in a college library, a function of responsible students' attempts to isolate themselves from the conversations and noises around them. However, another form of distraction may be coming right up those cables, and for some, it may be time to face the music -- or more specifically, the lyrics.

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This source can give me more info that I need to show that it hinders learning since  the brain focuses on the audio and not the learning

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This source can give me more info that I need to show that it hinders learning since  the brain focuses on the audio and not the learning

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When the office is almost too much to stomach, music can deliver much-needed relief on the job. Before you press Play, however, have a handle on when your tunes will be most beneficial for you and your brain.

Learning requires your brain to analyze and remember instructions and facts. When music is on, however, your brain has to process auditory data on top of processing the instructions and facts. Because of this multitasking, the brain can interpret the instructions and facts improperly, either associating them in odd ways or making mistakes about what's important enough to store. Thus, if you have to learn something at work, it's best to turn off your music, especially if you're learning verbally or through reading and the music has lyrics.

If your workspace is noisy, the brain will try to handle all the individual pieces of data in the noise. All that data processing takes energy you otherwise could use to focus on your job. It also increases levels of the stress-hormone cortisol and decreases levels of dopamine. Those hormonal changes negatively affect the prefrontal cortex, hindering executive function. Thus, productivity can go down, even if doing your required task doesn't require you to learn. In this scenario, listening to music can actually help, because it blocks out the other excessive input that could overwhelm you and keeps you calm.

Various studies have indicated that, in general, people who listened to music while they worked on repetitive tasks performed faster and made fewer errors. These results occur because music you like triggers the release of feel-good neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine, which help you feel relaxed and happy and, therefore, focus better. This is true even when the task you're doing is complex-- surgeons routinely listen to music in the operating room specifically because it relieves the stress that could compromise their focus and performance. An improved mood from music also affects how you interact with your co-workers. If you feel better, you usually are more respectful, patient, and cooperative, which can lead to better teamwork.

When you listen to music that's new to you, the activity involves an element of surprise or novelty. Your body releases dopamine in response to this "newness," causing you to feel some degree of pleasure. That ultimately can make the music more appealing than whatever other task you're trying to do, drawing your attention to the tune and compromising your work focus.

Music can make a huge difference in your workday. Feel free to crank up the volume if noise has you working like a snail, you've got a case of the Mondays, or you've got something mundane or familiar to do. Ideally, though, make your playlists out of songs you already know, and if your tasks involve any sort of linguistic processing, focus on lyric-free options. Lastly, if you have something to learn, pump up your mood with music before you get started.

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

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What Listening to Music at Work Does to Your Brain (It's Pretty Amazing)

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When the office is almost too much to stomach, music can deliver much-needed relief on the job. Before you press Play, however, have a handle on when your tunes will be most beneficial for you and your brain. Learning requires your brain to analyze and remember instructions and facts.

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I could use this source to further prove my point to show that it hinders learning. This source can give me evidence that I need to prove my point

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I could use this source to further prove my point to show that it hinders learning. This source can give me evidence that I need to prove my point

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There is a wealth of psychology research that can help teachers to improve how they work with students, but academic studies of this kind aren't always easy to access or translate into the realities of classroom practice. This series seeks to redress that by taking a selection of studies and making sense of the important information for teachers, as we all seek to answer the question: how can we help our students do better at school? This time, we consider growth mindset.
Many students do their homework and revision while listening to music. Many of them will swear that listening to their favourite songs makes them study better. But does music help or hinder learning? And does it matter what type of music you listen to while revising?

Researchers from the applied psychology department of Cardiff Metropolitan University led a study to answer this question. The authors, Nick Perham and Harriet Currie, assigned students into one of four groups: the first revised in silence, the second revised while listening to music with lyrics they liked (which included songs from One Direction and Katy Perry), the third group revised to music with lyrics they did not like (which comprised of very heavy metal bands), and the fourth group revised listening to music without lyrics.

The participants then took a test on the passages they had been revising, rating how distracting their environment had been, as well as writing down their predictions for how well they thought they had done.

What are the main findings?

1. Students who revised in quiet environments performed more than 60% better in an exam than their peers who revised while listening to music that had lyrics.

2. Students who revised while listening to music without lyrics did better than those who had revised to music with lyrics.

3. It made no difference if students revised listening to songs they liked or disliked. Both led to a reduction in their test performance.

4. Students who revised in silence rated their environment as less distracting and accurately predicted that this would lead to better performances in subsequent tests.

Related research

There are some benefits to listening to music while performing certain tasks. It can be quite motivating and it can improve mood (listening to your favourite song tends to make people smile, for example). But it does not help people learn new or complex material.

The misconception that music does help us learn stems from a series of studies linked to the " Mozart effect ", which found that people performed better on a series of cognitive tasks after listening to 10 minutes of Mozart. Participants in these studies appeared to be getting smarter and performing better in tests.

However, further research has since revealed this is not the case. While listening to music before a task can make someone feel better, listening to it while trying to learn something new tends not to help. This is because music - especially tunes with lyrics - can take up processing space. This conflicts with the material you are trying to learn, effectively creating a bottleneck in your memory, as there is less space to process what you are revising.

What does this mean for the classroom?

It is important that students are made aware of the pitfalls of listening to music when revising. Perham and Currie's study found that students rated the quiet environment as less distracting and better for them, yet many students continue to listen to music during their homework. Why? Perhaps they're doing so out of habit, or they confuse what improves their mood with what leads to good revision, or it alleviates boredom. Perhaps it's simply because everyone else is doing it.

Students need to know how to revise well. There may well be a time and place to listen to music during the course of their revision, but not when they are learning new and complex material. After all, silence is golden.

Bradley Busch is a registered psychologist, director at InnerDrive and author of Release Your Inner Drive. Follow @Inner_Drive on Twitter, and get advice on improving memory and a visual summary of this research on his website
Follow us on Twitter via @GuardianTeach, like us on Facebook, and join the Guardian Teacher Network the latest articles direct to your inbox Looking for a teaching job? Or perhaps you need to recruit school staff? Take a look at Guardian Jobs, the education specialist

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Drowned in sound: how listening to music hinders learning

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There is a wealth of psychology research that can help teachers to improve how they work with students, but academic studies of this kind aren't always easy to access or translate into the realities of classroom practice.

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I could use this source to talk about how it was thought to be beneficial after the "Mozart Effect" study. In my essay I can address the people that think music can help their brain learn.

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I could use this source to talk about how it was thought to be beneficial after the "Mozart Effect" study. In my essay I can address the people that think music can help their brain learn.

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Music and work don't always mix. wavebreakmedia/Shutterstock

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 favourite tunes playing in the background.

Pressmaster/Shutterstock

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 memorise 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 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 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.

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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.