White noise or water in the background can work for me, but I've never been able to do anything complicated/thought-intensive with music playing -- it just saps

White noise or water in the background can work for me, but I've never been able to do anything complicated/thought-intensive with music playing -- it just saps some of my attention more than it seems to for many people. Possibly related: Jonah Lehrer responded to the Provigil article; below is a comment posted by Joe Shelby on Lehrer's response post (http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/05/the_hidden_cost_of_smart_drugs.php http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/05/the_hidden_cost_of_sm...): --- Not "drug" related, but a similar study I once read about (I think it was cited in Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister's Peopleware) was about geeks and their listening to music while working. They were given a simple programming task, one easily done in "300 lines" using what we call brute force programming (follow the specified requirements to the letter). The test was originally designed to see if listening to music while working affected accuracy, with the idea that musical distractions might lead to more bugs in code. The programmers were allowed to work exactly as they would have worked in real life (this was back before easy internet connections made "cheating" more possible)), so some had headphones full of their favorite music, others worked in silence. What they found was that both groups (those with music, those without) completed the task with equal accuracy - music didn't affect that precision. However, they also discovered that some programmers found a secret in the proposed algorithm they were implementing. With a little cleverness, you could implement the algorithm in only 50 lines instead of the full 300, and be done in half the time. Of those that discovered the shorter implementation, most were from the programming in silence group.