From years ago, I remember reading about a study involving punch-card batch processing, where two teams were given a stack of input data and an algorithm to implement. One team listened to music, the other not. Both teams completed the task in about the same time, but the team not listening to music saw that after the complex algorithm, the output was the same as the input.
Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity
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Re: Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity
#32Music is a huge distraction while working. White noise or nothing. Some people on my team listen to podcasts while coding, and most of them were watching Cohen's testimony in the background on Wednesday. If they're not fooling themselves about their productivity, I'm really jealous.
For me it's "nothing". My home office is very calm but if I need to dive into something really fully and feel like I'm in my own bubble, I use a pair of big ear muff normally used in construction industry or other high noise environment (31dB noise reduction). It's like sensory deprivation just for audio.
Re: Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity
#33I'm a classical singer and just all around lover of music.. I'm also a software developer. Listening to music while I program is an absolute disaster. It either has to be a video or an audiobook.
I also have a classical music education and cannot write code (or anything really) with music playing. Vocals, non-vocals, doesn't matter, no matter how hard I try I find myself getting distracted in trying to dissect the music.
I recently restarted classical music education, and have found it makes it much harder to listen to music and concentrate on my software engineering. It used to be okay if the music doesn’t have vocals, now it has to be something simple I’ve heard many times before.
Re: Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity
#34Misleading title. "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)." This seems more like a pattern recognition puzzle. Not the flow state of "creativity".
They do address this in the paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/acp.3532. It seems this type of test is fairly common.
I guess there are a lot of different kinds of creativity. This seems to target something I'd think of specifically as "lateral thinking." I agree it doesn't seem like a very satisfying test, though.
Re: Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity
#35Pet peeve -- the article says music "significantly impairs" creativity. But I believe the paper only found evidence that there is a "significant chance that music impairs creativity." I'm not a stats expert, but I feel like these are different things?
Either this is an incredibly widespread mistake in science journalism, or it's not a mistake and I'm an idiot?
Re: Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity
#36So what is the solution to drown out ambient noise for example a noisy work place?
Re: Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity
#37So what is the solution to drown out ambient noise for example a noisy work place?
Brown noise?
Re: Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity
#38Misleading title. "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)." This seems more like a pattern recognition puzzle. Not the flow state of "creativity".
They do address this in the paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/acp.3532 . It seems this type of test is fairly common. I guess there are a lot of different kinds of creativity. This seems to target something I'd think of specifically as "lateral thinking." I agree it doesn't seem like a very satisfying test, though.
Regardless of the test, the title is misleading.
Re: Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity
#39It seems like what this study is really showing, which everyone should already understand, is that your brain cannot process two different information streams at the same time with any measure of success. The farther away your audio stream is from information and the closer it is to steady state (say, unvarying trance beats or, even better, brown noise) the less the impact will be. It's like comparing one person talking to you vs two people talking to you simultaneously. This has been studied before already to death.
But the OP article's premise of tying language center and word selection to "creativity" is weird and sounds like just bad science.
Re: Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity
#40When having to do architectural code stuff, then yeah quiet is usually best for me. But when I need to implement it (which involves a lot of "micro-creativity") then usually some pumping beats (but no vocal), fex[1], helps me keep the energy up and the code flowing.