Focusing with Music

Visit any college campus in America and I’m sure you’ll see dozens of students milling around with headphones or earbuds in. Enter a college library, and you’ll see an array of students typing or drawing still with their headphones on. All these students have a few things in common: they’ve got matching expressions of locked-in concentration, and they enjoy listening to music or podcasts while doing other things. While the right soundtrack can set an uplifting mood to an otherwise banal walk to class, whether it is possible to focus on very cerebral work while listening to music is an ongoing debate.

“The Mozart effect” was popularized by a 1990s study which showed that listening to Mozart’s piano sonatas might improve test scores and spatial reasoning. According to WebMD, however, this finding is still heavily contested. Some evidence exists to suggest that music can stimulate some brain activity, but some evidence contradicts these findings directly. The Mozart effect is thought to contribute more to mood than cognition anyway. According to the WebMD article, music can only help performance and studying if it’s a genre that the listener likes. This is consistent with my experience. Sometimes, listening to music that I like helps me work better and stay more on task – “locking in” with a good playlist and getting work done. Other times, I need my total concentration and need to study in silence to retain information. What are your study habits? Let us know: editorjaanu@thehappyherald.org 🎶