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Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity
- thinkingemote 8y agoInteresting. 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
- xxxdarrenxxx 8y agoNeither, there has been research done of people programming, and they measured the most activity to be in areas related to short term (working) memory. Also as a 10+ year musician, I prefer programming (or any task that needs focus) without any sound. Listening to music, makes me noticeably more relaxed in a "bad way", and I definitely can't get into the nitty gritty of an actual problem, with anywhere close of a hyperfocus "shit is real" kind of attitude. Music can get me in the mood, but when I get there and the music is off, it's 5 hours later and I wrote a figurative 1000 lines of working code.
- brianberns 8y agoWhy are we assuming that language = creative, and mathematics = not creative?
- thinkingemote 8y agoWell the article dealt with language, lyrics in music.
- jamra 8y agoProgramming 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.
- beaugunderson 8y agoLink to paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/acp.3532 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/acp.3532
- ccvannorman 8y agofta: 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 Instrumental music without lyrics Music with familiar lyrics What a pitri dish experiment. I don't give this any value whatever to actual creative tasks like painting or designing a video game. Music can help induce a state of flow to be creative in a multitude of work environs -- OK, but this research proved you can't solve a simple word riddle quite as well.
- matchagaucho 8y agoCame here to basically say this.
- tylerl 8y agoAgreed. This was like studying the effect of food quality on mental function by having participants solve addition problems while eating one of: a Skittle, a carrot, or a Tylenol.
- altairiumblue 8y agoI 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).
- tnzn 8y agoWhen a scientific definition is too far away from the common definition, using the word in a headline becomes a problem
- matchagaucho 8y agoMisleading 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".
- droithomme 8y agoYeah, I find their methodology unconvincing. This is a common problem in research, where some proxy test is presented and simply declared to be a way of measuring creativity, intelligence, empathy, honesty, criminal tendencies, ability to postpone rewards, etc. Eventually each of these methods falls apart due to lack of evidence and is abandoned, but it can take decades. There are still licensed professionals using Rorschach tests to measure personality traits, including creativity, criminal tendencies, and personality disorders, despite there being no evidence that the "test" works to do that. Or consider the use of the lie detector test. Or the ADE 651 "bomb detector". All with about as much evidence behind them as dowsing.
- l_t 8y agoThey do address this in the paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/acp.3532 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.
- dgzl 8y agoRegardless of the test, the title is misleading.
- jugg1es 8y agoI 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.
- DougN7 8y agoIt 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 :)
- Ibethewalrus 8y agoThis. I put a disc on repeat
- stmfreak 8y agoI 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.
- schwurb 8y agoADD 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).
- androidgirl 8y agoMusic 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!
- jwdunne 8y agoNot 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.
- larkeith 8y agoDespite 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.
- jeremyleach 8y agoActively 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.
- robbrown451 8y agoThis 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)
- pakitan 8y agoIt'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.
- Ace17 8y agoI think you're confusing "music" with "radio" here.
- pakitan 8y agoI'm pretty sure I'm not confusing anything. However you want to define "music" and "radio", both are passive consumption. Sure, there might be some types of music that engage your brain more than others but that would still be nothing, compared to, say, reading a book.
- j7ake 8y agoSo what is the solution to drown out ambient noise for example a noisy work place?
- ebg13 8y agoBrown noise?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- niccl 8y agoI can't recall where I got this, but I find the generated noise really good at reducing the distraction from co-workers' conversations, and it's not as boring as straight noise play -n synth brownnoise synth pinknoise mix synth sine amod 0.2 60 'play' is from the SoX package
- icosa 8y agohttps://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/cafeRestaurantNoiseGenerator.php https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/cafeRestaurantNoiseGenerat... is oddly helpful. The unintelligible babble sounds cover up real chatter.
- afturner 8y agoI'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.
- wildrhythms 8y agoI 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.
- ves 8y agosame. I think this tends to affect people with musical training or experience; my non-musician friends can happily listen to music and work, but I can’t.
- rcheu 8y agoI 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.
- ericsoderstrom 8y agoVideo or audio books sound a lot more distracting than music
- wharfjumper 8y agoI listen to music because I find conversations very distracting so an audiobook is disastrous for me.
- _raoulcousins 8y agoMusic 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.
- jobigoud 8y agoFor 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.
- commandlinefan 8y agoWell, 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.
- RickJWagner 8y agoI hate to see this. I really like music. I guess when I'm doing something repetitive and manual (like painting a house), then some music is just a welcome distraction. But when I'm working on something that requires heavy brainpower (like debugging some failing computer process), then silence does seem to be best.
- lcuff 8y agoFrom 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.
- jzylstra 8y agoConsistent with the study... Creativity (as insight in thought) is a form of blending from concept to output. You're saying that access to this insight was not achieved by members of the music-listening group.
- l_t 8y agoPet 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?
- mattkrause 8y agoThat 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.
- ebg13 8y agoIt 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.
- jeremyleach 8y agoExactly this.
- magicalhippo 8y agoWhen 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. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lwk9gsRlaPs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lwk9gsRlaPs
- Kaveren 8y agoI listen to lofi hip hop or a rain aimbient [0] while programming often. According to "Is Noise Always Bad? Exploring the Effects of Noise on Cognition" [1], this is actually fine. I think the rain ambient is fine, and perhaps even helpful, because it is steady and consistent, like the submission suggests. [0] https://asoftmurmur.com/ https://asoftmurmur.com/ [1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/665048?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/665048?seq=1#metadata_i...
- qwerty456127 8y agoIndeed, music probably helps only when used as a tool to cut off distractions or to tune our mood. I used to work in an office where junk music (local popular radio) played aloud all day long so I listened to a nicer kind of music in headphones (although what I actually wanted was perfect silence).
- DiseasedBadger 8y agoThe social sciences need to learn that some of the simplest words have the largest meaning. If your study is about one of those, you'd better be writing the General Relativity of your field. This study is absolutely not about creativity. What -if anything at all- it is, about, I see was left as an exercise to the reader.
- blueboo 8y agoIf you're listening to music/watching Netflix during work, your work will probably be automated or outsourced
- not_that_noob 8y agoI wonder if the type of instrumental music makes a difference. I find that soft techno like dub techno helps me focus, while classical does not.
- dharma1 8y ago+1 for dub techno when working. Pretty much the only thing that helps me focus
- buttslasher69 8y agoSometimes I have great difficulty reading when listening to music. I wonder if this same effect could influence driving.
- HNLurker2 8y ago(Anecdote) music with lyrics impairs creativity. I think its because lyrics makes you think.
- Grue3 8y agoThe 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.