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Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity

sciencesources.eurekalert.org

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Re: Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity

#11

Post by jamra »

thinkingemote wrote: post #2

Interesting. Does programming use this creative language part of the brain or more mathematical? I have found that some songs with English lyrics as being distracting but not as much as people talking on the telephone in an office space

Programming has different angles. There’s the social aspect of being consciencous and seeing what your junior teammates are thinking in order to help them out. There’s the high level logic of how your app connects together, how it may scale in the future and how you’re going to maintain it. I believe that is more creative or perhaps a combination of creativity and experience.

Then there is the notion of doing hardcore coding. Maybe that’s more logic or a combination of logic and pattern recognition.

Re: Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity

#12

Post by DougN7 »

jugg1es wrote: post #10

I have found this anecdotally to be true when doing the actual design work of a project. However, once I know what I want to do, music does typically put me into a groove. If you normally listen to music while coding, you may not realize how distracting it can be during periods of deep thought.

It took me years to convince my kids that studying with (vocal) music was not a good idea. After a particularly bad semester at college my daughter got desperate and decided to study without music. Her grades shot way up and now she’s a believer :)

Re: Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity

#13

Post by androidgirl »

Music is helpful in other ways that might overpower any negative effect.

In my case, music helps me out with my tinitus, without it I'm in a lot of pain. And unlike, say, white noise, listening to music helps a ton with depressed mood. I can't get through my days without its help!

Surely others have similar or different reasons for using music while working!

Re: Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity

#14

Post by jeremyleach »

Actively listening to music engages pattern recognition, prediction and working memory in the listener. It makes sense that this would disrupt concurrent 'creative' or more realistically, pattern matching tasks. However, this experiment does not seem to cover non-concurrent listening to music, aka the Mozart effect. It could well be that listening to music enhances creative ability when subsequently not listening to music. So that regular music listening enhances ability to make creative pattern associations over the long term.

Re: Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity

#15

Post by altairiumblue »

ccvannorman wrote: post #4

fta: For example, a participant was shown three words (e.g., dress, dial, flower), with the requirement being to find a single associated word (in this case "sun") that can be combined to make a common word or phrase (i.e., sundress, sundial and sunflower). The researchers used three experiments involving verbal tasks in either a quiet environment or while exposed to: Background music with foreign (unfamiliar) lyrics…

I think this is because you expect creativity to mean something resembling artistic ability (e.g. painting), while the paper's definition is closer to problem solving (performance on CRATs).

Re: Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity

#16

Post by jwdunne »

androidgirl wrote: post #13

Music is helpful in other ways that might overpower any negative effect. In my case, music helps me out with my tinitus, without it I'm in a lot of pain. And unlike, say, white noise, listening to music helps a ton with depressed mood. I can't get through my days without its help! Surely others have similar or different reasons for using music while working!

Not so severe in my case - your experience sounds rough :( - but music helps working in an open plan office.

A pair of good, ear covering headphones improves my focus in a huge way. Great for crunch times - especially with distraction prone ADHD.

Since I've been working there for a while, the headphones have become an analogue for a DND sign. Someone else in the office picks up my calls. Nobody disturbs unless it's our managing director with a pressing issue.

Re: Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity

#17

Post by larkeith »

androidgirl wrote: post #13

Music is helpful in other ways that might overpower any negative effect. In my case, music helps me out with my tinitus, without it I'm in a lot of pain. And unlike, say, white noise, listening to music helps a ton with depressed mood. I can't get through my days without its help! Surely others have similar or different reasons for using music while working!

Despite the title and article's claims, it appears that the researchers found the same:

> The third experiment - exposure to music with familiar lyrics- impaired creativity regardless of whether the music also boosted mood, induced a positive mood, was liked by the participants, or whether participants typically studied in the presence of music.

Given that they had to specify this, it would imply that for music without familiar lyrics creativity was not impaired (at least, to a statistically significant level) when participants enjoyed the music or usually study to music.

Re: Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity

#18

Post by robbrown451 »

This doesn't surprise me. Music is particularly detrimental to difficult cognitive tasks for me (i.e. coding), but to "true creativity" as well.

Tedious tasks music is fine with. Like tweaking pixels in a paint program or something. Things that don't take concentration.

Personally I recommend music be reserved for when you can really "get into it", such as when doing physical activities (dance, exercise, etc...especially ones you can do to the rhythm), or just sitting back and listening. And that should be often.

But using it as background when doing other things that tax your brain is to me a waste of the music. (as well as the problems noted in the study)

Re: Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity

#19

Post by pakitan »

It's funny the result sounds slightly controversial because music doesn't have the bad rep that TV does. If the study's conclusion was "Watching TV significantly impairs creativity", everybody would be like "d'oh!". However, listening to music is also an act of passive consumption, just like watching TV, so the result is not too surprising to me.

Re: Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity

#20

Post by tnzn »

altairiumblue wrote: post #15
ccvannorman wrote: post #4

fta: For example, a participant was shown three words (e.g., dress, dial, flower), with the requirement being to find a single associated word (in this case "sun") that can be combined to make a common word or phrase (i.e., sundress, sundial and sunflower). The researchers used three experiments involving verbal tasks in either a quiet environment or while exposed to: Background music with foreign (unfamiliar) lyrics…

I think this is because you expect creativity to mean something resembling artistic ability (e.g. painting), while the paper's definition is closer to problem solving (performance on CRATs).

When a scientific definition is too far away from the common definition, using the word in a headline becomes a problem
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