Is it good to study listening to music?

Listening to music when studying or doing work is a very common habit among university students. In libraries, many people choose to ignore that fragile and artificial silence that surrounds the tables and shelves isolating themselves from the outside by using headphones and a melody pleasant.

The same is true in some offices, although in that context isolating yourself from others is more problematic if you work in a team or in a large office with open cubicles. Whether or not there is isolation, however, The common factor among these people is that they see music as a tool that can improve concentration., productivity and task completion in general.

But... Is this true? Does music really help us focus better on what we are doing, be it memorizing a text, studying about complex topics, or writing projects?

Music in repetitive tasks

Many decades ago scientific studies were carried out around this subject; among other things because if music can be used to improve student performance or workers, this information can be very useful for organizations able to finance this study class.

Thus, for example, an investigation whose results They were published in 1972. was designed to try to better understand the relationship between listening to melodies and changes in productivity. Through a series of observations, an increase in workers' performance was recorded when they listened to music that came from loudspeakers.

However, this research was the product of its time, and was used to study only one very specific and representative work context of that time: that of factories. Workforce tasks were repetitive, predictable, and boring, and music acted as a stimulant of mental activity. As work was more rewarding and enjoyable, productivity results were also better.

Other investigations that came later served to reinforce the idea that music improves the performance of routine and monotonous tasks. This was good news, since a large part of the workforce was dedicated to assembling items on assembly lines, but... what about the more complex and creative works, those that cannot be made by machines? What happens with the study of complex university syllabi, which cannot be literally memorized, but rather need to be understood and worked on mentally?

When the task is complicated, silence is better

It seems that when the task at hand requires us to really concentrate on what we are doing, the presence of music is a drag that we should avoid.

For example, in research published in Psychological Reports It was found that when a series of volunteers were asked to count backwards while listening to a piece of music of their choice, those who did it while the chosen piece was playing did significantly worse than those who had not been able to choose and simply carried out the task without listening to music.

Many other investigations go along this same line: the catchiest melodies or the ones that the person likes have devastating effects on performance when studying or performing moderately complex mental operations, especially if the music has lyrics in a language that is understood.

In other words, even if music is used to study, this may be simply because the music is liked, not because it improves the results when it comes to memorizing and learning. You listen to these tunes despite the effects it has on performance, not because of their effectiveness in that context.

Why is it not good to listen to music when studying?

The answer lies in two concepts: multitasking and attentional focus. Multitasking is the ability to perform more than one task in parallel, and it is closely related to working memory.. That memory type that is in charge of keeping in our mind elements with which we work in real time. What happens is that this kind of RAM memory in our brain is very limited, and it is believed that it can only be used to manipulate between 4 and 7 elements at the same time.

The attentional focus is the way in which the brain directs mental processes towards solving some problems and not others. When we concentrate on something we make a large part of our nervous system start working to solve it, but for this you have to pay the price of neglecting other functions.

That is why, for example, if we are walking down the street reflecting on something, it is common for us to find ourselves straying. to continue walking along one of the routes that we follow on a regular basis: going to work, going to the bus stop, etc.

But the problem with attentional focus is not only that it can only encompass certain processes and not others. In addition, we must also take into account that we do not always have full control over it, and it can deviate from what we should be doing very easily.

Music, specifically, is one of the great lures to which attention tends to succumb; it is tremendously easy for the focus of attention to become disengaged from studying or carrying out complex mental operations to begin to recreate in the appreciation of the melody and the verses that contains.

motor memory

So, for those more challenging tasks it is better not to disturb our attentional focus by presenting it with a distracting temptation in the form of catchy music and understandable lyrics. But then... Why is this effect not noticeable in monotonous tasks?

The answer is that a good part of the processes that we carry out when attending to routine jobs are managed by a part of our brain that are fulfilling their objectives without the attentional focus having to intervene in it.

Specifically, motor memory, mediated by some brain structures known as basal ganglia, is responsible for a large part of these sequences of automated actions. You just have to see how people who have spent years making parts fit together on an assembly line work: maybe they work so fast that it seems very difficult what you are doing, but in reality you do not even concentrate enough to carry it out cape.

With studies, the opposite is true. If certain university courses are difficult, it is precisely because studying them implies facing unforeseen problems constantly, and these cannot be minimized using a simple tune.

Conclusion: it depends on the type of content to study

The effect that music has on our ability to study varies according to the complexity of the content that we must learn.

For the most mechanical and monotonous tasks, which are those in which we can always be guided by the same memorization system (for example, assigning a name to each river located on a map), music can make us make more progress, although this will not happen in all the cases and there are certain personal psychological characteristics that also influence, such as the ease with which each one manages their focus attention for.

However, if music helps to study in these cases it is not because it "dope" our intelligence momentarily nor anything similar, but simply because it makes that activity more pleasant and we stay in it for longer, without looking for distractions outside.

However, for the most complicated tasks, practically in all cases listening to music is counterproductive and hinders the action of studying. This is so because for this type of activity we need to take full control of our attentional focus, so that distractions do not reduce our ability to "mentally operate" on the contents that we must assimilate. Even if we don't notice it, listening to a melody