Does music actually increase concentration?
Whether it is to boost motivation, to reduce stress, or simply to make a mundane job more enjoyable, people all over the world listen to music as a way to maintain their focus and productivity. Many such people argue that having music on in the background helps them block out distractions, and to concentrate better; in fact, you likely will not be able to find a study space these days without finding headphone- or earbud-adorning students, hard at work. Music is widely recognised to be a brain stimulant with tangible stress-reducing health benefits, including reducing your blood pressure and heart rate. It is thus interesting to consider - why does music help us concentrate better? More practically, using music as a productivity ‘cheat code’. Which are the kinds of music we should be listening to, to help us better maintain - or even to increase - our focus?
Why does music help us pay attention?
To figure out what kind of music helps us concentrate, we first need to understand the effect that music has on our brain. In short, we seem to have two attention systems: a conscious one, and an unconscious one. The former allows us to direct our focus to any work or issues that might need our attention, while the latter is more linked to emotional and sensory processing, and is more prone to picking up background noise and distracting us from the tasks at hand. Our unconscious attention system is constantly searching for anything of interest in our peripheral senses - and only becomes more potent when we’re trying to complete a boring task. For example, I remember sitting in my GCSE Biology exam with an invigilator who wouldn’t stop jangling her bracelets. A good number of years later, it is still something that I very clearly remember being frustrated by.
However, in a non-exam conditioned area of focus, music is often said to be a good tool to neutralise the sensory distractions around us. According to Dr Masha Godkin, music taps into both the left and the right sides of the brain simultaneously, activating both hemispheres. This has been reported to mean that music also has the ability to maximise learning through improving memory retention.
Which types of music should we listen to?
It seems obvious that listening to different styles of music will prompt different responses in your brain - for the most part, music with a strong beat makes you want to dance, and sad music makes you melancholy. Music with repetitive, catchy lyrics may be distracting, and bleak music may sap you of any energy or enthusiasm you need to muster up to complete your work.
An experiment conducted by the Cambridge Brain Sciences research team found that memory performance was best while listening to what they described as ‘low arousal, negative music’. This was music with a slow tempo combined with major (i.e. ‘happy’) chords. A study by Northcentral University agrees with this finding, arguing that music with 60 to 70 beats per minute (like Beethoven’s Für Elise) appears to help students study longer, and to retain more information. The volume of your study music is also key - you don’t want your music to be so loud that it drowns all your thoughts out! Furthermore, ‘music’ such as pink noise - a less invasive alternative to white noise - has also been promoted around some workplaces to boost productivity.
Personally, I’ve always found instrumental music to be the most helpful when I need to concentrate on an important task. Lyrics in music tend to distract me, and when I need to be reading an article or writing an essay, being distracted by more words is the last thing I need!
When our tasks inevitably demand higher levels of concentration, perhaps picking the right music to have on in the background can make our work a bit easier! After all, minimising the distractions around us is a crucial first step to helping us focus better - and music can be a means for us achieve this.
References:
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/aug/20/does-music-really-help-you-concentrate