Is it good to study while listening to music?

Using tunes and songs that you like is not necessarily the best way to improve your performance.

Listening to music while studying or doing homework is a common habit among college students.. In libraries, many people choose to ignore the fragile and artificial silence that envelops the tables and shelves by isolating themselves from the outside world through the use of headphones and a pleasant melody.

The same happens in some offices, although in this context isolating oneself 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 for these people is that they see music as a tool that can improve concentration, productivity and task completion.productivity and overall task completion.

But... is this true? Does music really help us concentrate better on what we are doing, whether it is memorizing a text, studying about complex subjects or writing projects?

Music in repetitive tasks

Scientific studies on this subject have been carried out for many decades; among other things, because if music can be used to improve the performance of students or workers, this information can be very useful for organizations capable of financing this kind of studies.

Thus, for example, a research project whose results were published in 1972 was designed to try to learn more about 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 coming from loudspeakers.

However, this research was a child of its time, and was used to study only a very specific and representative work context of that era: that of the factories. The tasks of the work force were repetitive, predictable and boring, and music acted as a stimulant to the work force.and music acted as a stimulant of mental activity. As the work was more grateful and pleasant, the results in productivity were also better.

Other research that came later served to reinforce the idea that music improves the performance of routine and monotonous tasks. This was good news, since much of the workforce was engaged in assembling items on assembly lines, but... what about more complex, monotonous jobs? but what about the more complex and creative jobs, those that can't be performedthose that cannot be performed by machines? What about the study of complex university syllabi, which cannot be memorized literally but need to be understood and worked through mentally?

When the task becomes more complicated, silence is best

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

For example, research published in Psychological Reports 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 so while the music was playing were more likely to be able to count backwards, those who did so while the piece of their choice was playing did significantly worse than those who did not than those who did not have a choice and simply performed the task without listening to music.

Much other research is along the same lines: the catchier tunes or tunes 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 you understand.especially if the music has lyrics in a language that is understood.

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

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

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

Attentional focus is the way in which the brain orients mental processes towards the resolution of some problems and not others. When we concentrate on something we make a large part of our nervous system start to work to solve it, but to do so we must pay the price of but to do so we have to pay the price of neglecting other functions..

That is why, for example, if we are walking down the street thinking about something, we often find ourselves taking a detour to continue walking along one of the routes we usually follow: going to work, to the bus stop, etc.

But the problem with the attentional focus is not only that it can only cover certain processes and not others. In addition, we must also bear in mind that we do not always have total control over it, and it can very easily deviate from what we should be doing.

Music, in particular, is one of the great lures to which attention tends to succumb.It is tremendously easy for the attentional focus to become disengaged from study or the performance of complex mental operations to move on to enjoy the appreciation of the melody and the verses it contains.

Motor memory

So, for those more challenging tasks it is best 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 it that in monotonous tasks this effect is not noticeable?

The answer is that a large part of the processes we carry out when attending to routine tasks are managed by a part of our brain that fulfills its objectives without the attentional focus having to intervene.

Specifically, motor memorymediated by encephalic structures known as basal ganglia, is responsible for a large part of these sequences of automated actions. Just look at how people who have been working for years fitting parts on an assembly line work: they may work so fast that what they do seems very difficult, but in reality they are not even concentrating too hard to do it.

The opposite is true of studies. If certain university courses are difficult, it is precisely because they involve constantly facing unforeseen problems, and these cannot be minimized by using a simple melody.

Conclusion: it depends on the type of content to be studied.

The effect that music has on our capacity to study varies according to the complexity of the contents to be learned.. 

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

However, if music helps us to study in these cases it is not because it "dulls" our intelligence momentarily or anything like that or anything like that, but simply because it makes the activity more pleasant and we stay at it for longer, without looking for distractions outside.

However, for more complicated tasks, listening to music is counterproductive in practically all cases and hinders the action of studying. This is so because for this type of activities we need to take total control of our attentional focus, so that distractions do notso that distractions do not detract from our ability to "operate mentally" on the contents we must assimilate. Even if we do not notice it, listening to a melody