I don’t listen to music while working, because of studies showing that, e.g., programmers listening to music are equally competent at implementing a given algorithm, but much less likely to notice that the algorithm’s output is always equal to its input.
This is absolutely true. I’m a little shocked at how many programmers and other ‘mind-workers’ (students are especially bad at this) think that putting on some music is helpful, or neutral. It’s neither; even classical music or chants hurt.
(I have no studies handy for this, but I’ve tried music with Mnemosyne, Gbrainy, and Dual N-back, and in all 3 and all the sessions, my statistical performance was hurt to a greater or less extent.)
It occurs to me that I made something of a paternalistic assumption here: that people who do think they aren’t harmed, or are helped, by music are simply wrong/mistaken about it. Perhaps it’s simply that some people can handle the music and some can’t, and I fall into the latter?
I’m glad to say that just today I saw media coverage of a study on multitasking indicating that people used to multitasking are both worse than singletaskers and deluded about it: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8219212.stm
This is absolutely true. I’m a little shocked at how many programmers and other ‘mind-workers’ (students are especially bad at this) think that putting on some music is helpful, or neutral. It’s neither; even classical music or chants hurt.
Music seems to work sometimes with getting started on things. Maybe it does narrow the cognitive space, but this is actually a good thing as long as the mind isn’t really occupied with the actual work and is instead full of random, distracting thoughts. So maybe there should be a music player mode which starts normally, but then slowly fades out during the next ten minutes or so?
Music can also alter mood, which could likewise be useful for getting started on working.
(I have no studies handy for this, but I’ve tried music with Mnemosyne, Gbrainy, and Dual N-back, and in all 3 and all the sessions, my statistical performance was hurt to a greater or less extent.)
One thing I’d be interested in knowing is whether the familiarity of the music matters. I wouldn’t be surprised if completely novel music caused a larger cognitive load than familiar music. What about if you’ve heard the piece of music once, ten times or a hundred times?
Also, what effect does the type of the music have? Lyrics probably make a difference. What about music that doesn’t even have many recognizable melodies, such as ambient or trance? What about white noise?
I listen to music when I’m doing work that I’m not unusually interested in. It helps me zone out background noise and keeps me from jumping online to waste time reading something more interesting. I can never listen to new music while studying though and overly complex music (particularly classical) ends up drawing my attention and I end up following the music. I prefer dance music, it is repetitive enough that I don’t have to listen to every note to follow it, it usually has few lyrics and the beat energizes me.
Next time I have a paper I’ll try to stop the music once I’ve gotten a good start and see if that makes a difference.
Music seems to work sometimes with getting started on things. Maybe it does narrow the cognitive space, but this is actually a good thing as long as the mind isn’t really occupied with the actual work and is instead full of random, distracting thoughts. So maybe there should be a music player mode which starts normally, but then slowly fades out during the next ten minutes or so?
Music can also alter mood, which could likewise be useful for getting started on working.
This is worth thinking about. I was trying to figure out why people like music during demanding tasks so much, and maybe it’s a way of distracting themselves and committing only partially to the task—maybe studying or whatever is too ‘painful’ to fully concentrate on. (There’s a connection to akrasia here, I’m certain.)
One thing I’d be interested in knowing is whether the familiarity of the music matters. I wouldn’t be surprised if completely novel music caused a larger cognitive load than familiar music. What about if you’ve heard the piece of music once, ten times or a hundred times?
Also, what effect does the type of the music have? Lyrics probably make a difference. What about music that doesn’t even have many recognizable melodies, such as ambient or trance? What about white noise?
As I said, any music seems to be a negative. I can’t speak to ambient or trance or white noise simply because I don’t play them (if you’re really curious about the full gamut of music I tried out, I can say I tried the majority of my collection, and if you’re curious what that entails, see http://www.last.fm/user/gwern ); however, I did try out various binaural beats generated by Sbagen which sounded a lot like white noise and had a similar negative effect.
I wonder if I should turn off the music when playing certain video games, then?
Even if music doesn’t improve performance, putting on a Final Fantasy soundrack can still help me feel less frustrated. My auditory cortex rarely shuts up; if I’m not thinking in words at the moment, I very often find that I have some kind of tune looping in my head.
I also prefer to work without music, but I use it to switch my brain into “action mode”.
The music I tend to use for such mood-switching is usually energetic and sometimes aggressive (examples include action pieces from movies like Predator 2 or Matrix, various electro DJs, selected rap / hip-hop etc.) -- and I stay away from serious music (in my case its mostly Arvo Pärt, John Tavener and J.S. Bach).
Also, music is sometimes helpful for mentally isolating myself from coworkers, especially when they bug me with questions—however, just putting the headphones on without music can do the trick. I read that Tim Ferris does that too.
If anyone does have studies to hand I’d be grateful for references.* I personally find it difficult to work without music. That may be habit as much as anything else, though I expect part of the benefit is due to shutting out other, more distracting noise. I’ve noticed negative effects on my productivity on the rare occasions I’ve listened to music with lyrics, but that’s about it.
* I’d be especially grateful for anything that looks at how much individual variation there is in the effect of music.
Sometimes, but it varies quite a lot depending on exactly what I’m doing. The only correlation I’ve noticed between the effect of music and work-type is that the negative effect of lyrics is more pronounced when I’m trying to write.
Of course, it’s entirely possible that I’m just not noticing the right things—which is why I’d be interested in references.
The idea is that when you are listening to music, you are handicapping yourself by taking some of the attention of the aural modality. If you are used to rely on it in your thinking, this makes you impaired.
In the experiment, you need to count in your mind, while doing various activities. That attention was really paid to the counting is controlled by you first calibrating and then using the counting process to predict when exactly a minute has passed. Thus, you can’t cheat, you have to really go on counting.
Feynman himself says that he was unable to speak while counting, as he was “speaking” and “hearing” these numbers in his mind. Another man he asked to do the experiment had no difficulty speaking, but was unable to read: he then explained that he was counting visually.
I tried it both ways, and the difference shows in different speeds of counting in these modes which are hard to synchronize (and so just switching between them doesn’t work very well).
The idea is that when you are listening to music, you are handicapping yourself by taking some of the attention of the aural modality.
I’d heard something similar from a friend who majored in psychology, but they explained it in terms of verbal processing rather than auditory processing more generally, which is why (they said) music without words wasn’t as bad.
I’m not sure whether it’s related, but I’ve also been told by a number of musically-trained friends that they can’t work with music at all, because they can’t help but analyse it as they listen: for them, listening seems to automatically involve processing work that it doesn’t (seem to) for me, precisely because I’m not capable of such processing. (This was part of the reason I was originally wondering about individual variation; the point you make at the end is really interesting in this regard too.)
In a possibly-related anecdote, I can’t listen to music I’ve played in Guitar Hero while working, as my mind switches into Guitar Hero mode and all I see are streams of colored buttons.
I’m not sure whether it’s related, but I’ve also been told by a number of musically-trained friends that they can’t work with music at all, because they can’t help but analyse it as they listen: for them, listening seems to automatically involve processing work that it doesn’t (seem to) for me, precisely because I’m not capable of such processing.
I find that very interesting too, since I am in fact the opposite of your musically-trained friends: I am quite rubbish at anything musical, am hard-of-hearing, and have great difficulty analysing music & songs. (In part that’s why I listen to so much J-pop: since I often can’t understand the lyrics even if they’re in English...)
I often need to start some work with music, because I constantly have an internal jukebox running. A lot of people listen to music to fuel that narrative illusion, which gives them motivation, and some do so to block out more distracting noise, as conchis mentioned. Mine is a variant on the latter, so I just get something with low information content stuck in my head before sitting down for serious work.
(I make an exception in certain stages of writing fiction, since I often soundtrack scenes as I create them, or even create scenes that fit the melody.)
This is absolutely true. I’m a little shocked at how many programmers and other ‘mind-workers’ (students are especially bad at this) think that putting on some music is helpful, or neutral. It’s neither; even classical music or chants hurt.
(I have no studies handy for this, but I’ve tried music with Mnemosyne, Gbrainy, and Dual N-back, and in all 3 and all the sessions, my statistical performance was hurt to a greater or less extent.)
It occurs to me that I made something of a paternalistic assumption here: that people who do think they aren’t harmed, or are helped, by music are simply wrong/mistaken about it. Perhaps it’s simply that some people can handle the music and some can’t, and I fall into the latter?
I’m glad to say that just today I saw media coverage of a study on multitasking indicating that people used to multitasking are both worse than singletaskers and deluded about it: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8219212.stm
So there! :)
Music seems to work sometimes with getting started on things. Maybe it does narrow the cognitive space, but this is actually a good thing as long as the mind isn’t really occupied with the actual work and is instead full of random, distracting thoughts. So maybe there should be a music player mode which starts normally, but then slowly fades out during the next ten minutes or so?
Music can also alter mood, which could likewise be useful for getting started on working.
One thing I’d be interested in knowing is whether the familiarity of the music matters. I wouldn’t be surprised if completely novel music caused a larger cognitive load than familiar music. What about if you’ve heard the piece of music once, ten times or a hundred times?
Also, what effect does the type of the music have? Lyrics probably make a difference. What about music that doesn’t even have many recognizable melodies, such as ambient or trance? What about white noise?
Additional anecdotal evidence:
I listen to music when I’m doing work that I’m not unusually interested in. It helps me zone out background noise and keeps me from jumping online to waste time reading something more interesting. I can never listen to new music while studying though and overly complex music (particularly classical) ends up drawing my attention and I end up following the music. I prefer dance music, it is repetitive enough that I don’t have to listen to every note to follow it, it usually has few lyrics and the beat energizes me.
Next time I have a paper I’ll try to stop the music once I’ve gotten a good start and see if that makes a difference.
This is worth thinking about. I was trying to figure out why people like music during demanding tasks so much, and maybe it’s a way of distracting themselves and committing only partially to the task—maybe studying or whatever is too ‘painful’ to fully concentrate on. (There’s a connection to akrasia here, I’m certain.)
As I said, any music seems to be a negative. I can’t speak to ambient or trance or white noise simply because I don’t play them (if you’re really curious about the full gamut of music I tried out, I can say I tried the majority of my collection, and if you’re curious what that entails, see http://www.last.fm/user/gwern ); however, I did try out various binaural beats generated by Sbagen which sounded a lot like white noise and had a similar negative effect.
I wonder if I should turn off the music when playing certain video games, then?
Even if music doesn’t improve performance, putting on a Final Fantasy soundrack can still help me feel less frustrated. My auditory cortex rarely shuts up; if I’m not thinking in words at the moment, I very often find that I have some kind of tune looping in my head.
I also prefer to work without music, but I use it to switch my brain into “action mode”.
The music I tend to use for such mood-switching is usually energetic and sometimes aggressive (examples include action pieces from movies like Predator 2 or Matrix, various electro DJs, selected rap / hip-hop etc.) -- and I stay away from serious music (in my case its mostly Arvo Pärt, John Tavener and J.S. Bach).
Also, music is sometimes helpful for mentally isolating myself from coworkers, especially when they bug me with questions—however, just putting the headphones on without music can do the trick. I read that Tim Ferris does that too.
If anyone does have studies to hand I’d be grateful for references.* I personally find it difficult to work without music. That may be habit as much as anything else, though I expect part of the benefit is due to shutting out other, more distracting noise. I’ve noticed negative effects on my productivity on the rare occasions I’ve listened to music with lyrics, but that’s about it.
* I’d be especially grateful for anything that looks at how much individual variation there is in the effect of music.
Do you rely mostly on visual imagination?
Sometimes, but it varies quite a lot depending on exactly what I’m doing. The only correlation I’ve noticed between the effect of music and work-type is that the negative effect of lyrics is more pronounced when I’m trying to write.
Of course, it’s entirely possible that I’m just not noticing the right things—which is why I’d be interested in references.
The idea is that when you are listening to music, you are handicapping yourself by taking some of the attention of the aural modality. If you are used to rely on it in your thinking, this makes you impaired.
This is related to an experiment that Feynman describes in this video:
Feynman ‘Fun to Imagine’ 11: Ways of Thinking
In the experiment, you need to count in your mind, while doing various activities. That attention was really paid to the counting is controlled by you first calibrating and then using the counting process to predict when exactly a minute has passed. Thus, you can’t cheat, you have to really go on counting.
Feynman himself says that he was unable to speak while counting, as he was “speaking” and “hearing” these numbers in his mind. Another man he asked to do the experiment had no difficulty speaking, but was unable to read: he then explained that he was counting visually.
I tried it both ways, and the difference shows in different speeds of counting in these modes which are hard to synchronize (and so just switching between them doesn’t work very well).
Thanks for the explanation.
I’d heard something similar from a friend who majored in psychology, but they explained it in terms of verbal processing rather than auditory processing more generally, which is why (they said) music without words wasn’t as bad.
I’m not sure whether it’s related, but I’ve also been told by a number of musically-trained friends that they can’t work with music at all, because they can’t help but analyse it as they listen: for them, listening seems to automatically involve processing work that it doesn’t (seem to) for me, precisely because I’m not capable of such processing. (This was part of the reason I was originally wondering about individual variation; the point you make at the end is really interesting in this regard too.)
In a possibly-related anecdote, I can’t listen to music I’ve played in Guitar Hero while working, as my mind switches into Guitar Hero mode and all I see are streams of colored buttons.
I find that very interesting too, since I am in fact the opposite of your musically-trained friends: I am quite rubbish at anything musical, am hard-of-hearing, and have great difficulty analysing music & songs. (In part that’s why I listen to so much J-pop: since I often can’t understand the lyrics even if they’re in English...)
It seems obvious to me that it’s a hindrance—still, putting on headphones and covering ambient noise with music might be less distracting.
I often need to start some work with music, because I constantly have an internal jukebox running. A lot of people listen to music to fuel that narrative illusion, which gives them motivation, and some do so to block out more distracting noise, as conchis mentioned. Mine is a variant on the latter, so I just get something with low information content stuck in my head before sitting down for serious work.
(I make an exception in certain stages of writing fiction, since I often soundtrack scenes as I create them, or even create scenes that fit the melody.)
Yep. Sometimes very distracting, as I do remixes in my head … might try pink noise and see how that goes :-D