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Anything with Lyrics wrecks my concentration. Somehow my mind just can't stop tracking speech. Instrumental is OK, but silence is too. I know lots of people th
by spfzero 5y ago
Anything with Lyrics wrecks my concentration. Somehow my mind just can't stop tracking speech. Instrumental is OK, but silence is too.
I know lots of people though who must have music on, or they simply cannot concentrate. For them, it might be that the music gives the mind something to hold on to, kind of a rail to help stay on track, and in the absence of that, their mind would wander farther afield.
- maicro 5y agoOne thing I've heard recommended, and enjoyed a bit myself, is to listen to music with lyrics in a language that you don't speak (at all, I'd say) - the (heavy conjecture) theory being that the foreign language isn't recognized and parsed as "speech", so avoids the language areas of the brain.
- bjelkeman-again 5y agoOr music which you know very well, works for me. Hard rock from the late seventies go in one ear and out the other when I am writing.
- QuercusMax 5y agoFor me it's Rob Zombie's Hellbilly Deluxe. Not proud of it, but something about it gets me into a flow state for coding sessions.
- progre 5y agoNothing to be ashamed of, that album is great!
- toss1 5y agoYES. I can listen to things w/lyrics while doing CAD work; with any task requiring language, text, etc. it is too distracting, although some calm instrumentals are tolerable. When I really get focused on a bit of work, whatever music is playing literally disappears - if you came to me 3min later and offered me $millions to tell you what song just played, I'd get nothing. Cats are even more amazing - I can't find it right now, but I remember in reading studies in some of my college neuroscience classes where electrodes were put on cats to track their audio system with a clock/metronome sound in the background. You can trace the signal processing up through various nodes of the system at successively higher levels. When a mouse was let into the area, the metronome click trace disappeared from the data of almost every level of processing - it was entirely filtered out almost at the raw audio stage when the mouse showed up. That's focus.
- shaan7 5y ago> might be that the music gives the mind something to hold on to The way it feels to me is it gives me a consistent background to work. For example, once I have decided on a particular way to solve a problem and its time to code - I put a long DnB track. Another way to describe it is that it gives my brain's CPU a consistent clock, so to speak xD
- definitelyhuman 5y agoThe podcast Flow State changed my life - lyric-less music to drive focus, built around 30m pomodoro intervals. Highly recommended
- nsp 5y agoFor the sibling comment - minutes, the original timer was apparently shaped like a tomato https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique
- fsckboy 5y agopomodoro, being italian for tomato, what is a 30m interval of it? minutes i'm guessing rather than meters, but who knows...
- jdlshore 5y agoIt’s a work style—work 25 min, then take a 5 min break. The team that invented it used a tomato-shaped kitchen timer, hence the name.
- progre 5y agoI'm finding myself deep in black and doom metal while coding. Both genres are kind of droning with very saturated sound spectrums, the main diffrence is the tempo of the songs really. Most importantly though, the vocals are generally growled and very low in the mix. Absolute best is vocals in languages I can't understand. Clean vocals breaks my concentration.
- 8bitsrule 5y ago'Music' with lyrics is using music as a carrier-wave to modulate in order to convey a message. Bound to be distracting.
- k_sze 5y agoI find that lyrics is mostly ok for me as long as it’s in a foreign language that I don’t really understand.