So what is the solution to drown out ambient noise for example a noisy work place?
[deleted]
Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity
51–60 of 60 posts
Re: Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity
#52So what is the solution to drown out ambient noise for example a noisy work place?
https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/cafeRestaurantNoiseGenerat... is oddly helpful. The unintelligible babble sounds cover up real chatter.
Re: Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity
#53Pet 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?
That statement is not particularly precise and tacitly claims a lot of things. It’s best to think of it as shorthand for something like “When the test, which is thought to measure creativity, is run with music (vs. without music), the subjects’ performance decreases more than the sampling variability we’d expect when repeatedly running one of the conditions in the experiment over and over.”
This is essentially a Frequentist claim, which is a bit different from your Bayesian belief updating about music’s effects. If, when, and how you can from one to the other has been a major debate in statistics and science.
Re: Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity
#54Sometimes I have great difficulty reading when listening to music. I wonder if this same effect could influence driving.
Re: Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity
#55Music 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.
Well, the idiotic, counter-productive ‘open office’ trend doesn’t give most of us much choice - listen to music (productivity impairing or not) or listen to coworkers (productivity killing) inane pointless chatter.
Re: Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity
#56I 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.
I find I can either listen to music or think deeply. Not to say one prevents the other. When I emerge from a session of deep focus I am often surprised by the songs on my playlist—specifically, not being able to remember hearing any of those recently played.
Re: Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity
#57It 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 talk…
Exactly this.
Re: Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity
#58(Anecdote) music with lyrics impairs creativity. I think its because lyrics makes you think.
Re: Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity
#59I 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.
ADD person here: I feel that this is true for me aswell when I am in the rare state of being able to focus. When I am understimulated, listening to music seems to increase my focus (and otherwise I will move or sing silently to create that stimulus myself).
Re: Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity
#60The problem is that the test subjects were listening to unfamiliar music. If they were listening to what they're always listening to, they wouldn't be nearly as distracted. Personally, most of my hobby projects were coded while listening to loud music (mostly punk rock) that I guess would be quite distracting to unfamiliar people, but I don't think it stifled my creativity in any way.