Listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity

Misleading title.<p><i>&quot;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 &quot;sun&quot;) that can be combined to make a common word or phrase (i.e., sundress, sundial and sunflower).&quot;</i><p>This seems more like a pattern recognition puzzle. Not the flow state of &quot;creativity&quot;.

I 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.

Actively listening to music engages pattern recognition, prediction and working memory in the listener. It makes sense that this would disrupt concurrent &#x27;creative&#x27; 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.

It 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&#x27;s like comparing one person talking to you vs two people talking to you simultaneously. This has been studied before already to death.<p>But the OP article&#x27;s premise of tying language center and word selection to &quot;creativity&quot; is weird and sounds like just bad science.

fta: 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 &quot;sun&quot;) that can be combined to make a common word or phrase (i.e., sundress, sundial and sunflower).<p>The researchers used three experiments involving verbal tasks in either a quiet environment or while exposed to:<p>Background music with foreign (unfamiliar) lyrics Instrumental music without lyrics Music with familiar lyrics<p>What a pitri dish experiment. I don&#x27;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&#x27;t solve a simple word riddle quite as well.

Interesting. Does programming use this creative language part of the brain or more mathematical?<p>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

Music is helpful in other ways that might overpower any negative effect.<p>In my case, music helps me out with my tinitus, without it I&#x27;m in a lot of pain. And unlike, say, white noise, listening to music helps a ton with depressed mood. I can&#x27;t get through my days without its help!<p>Surely others have similar or different reasons for using music while working!

The social sciences need to learn that some of the simplest words have the largest meaning. If your study is about one of those, you&#x27;d better be writing the General Relativity of your field.<p>This study is absolutely not about creativity. What -if anything at all- it <i>is,</i> about, I see was left as an exercise to the reader.

I listen to lofi hip hop or a rain aimbient [0] while programming often. According to &quot;Is Noise Always Bad? Exploring the Effects of Noise on Cognition&quot; [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.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;asoftmurmur.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;asoftmurmur.com&#x2F;</a> [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jstor.org&#x2F;stable&#x2F;10.1086&#x2F;665048?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jstor.org&#x2F;stable&#x2F;10.1086&#x2F;665048?seq=1#metadata_i...</a>

When 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 &quot;micro-creativity&quot;) then usually some pumping beats (but no vocal), fex[1], helps me keep the energy up and the code flowing.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Lwk9gsRlaPs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Lwk9gsRlaPs</a>

Pet peeve -- the article says music &quot;significantly impairs&quot; creativity. But I believe the paper only found evidence that there is a &quot;significant chance that music impairs creativity.&quot; I&#x27;m not a stats expert, but I feel like these are different things?<p>Either this is an incredibly widespread mistake in science journalism, or it&#x27;s not a mistake and I&#x27;m an idiot?

From 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.

This doesn&#x27;t surprise me. Music is particularly detrimental to difficult cognitive tasks for me (i.e. coding), but to &quot;true creativity&quot; as well.<p>Tedious tasks music is fine with. Like tweaking pixels in a paint program or something. Things that don&#x27;t take concentration.<p>Personally I recommend music be reserved for when you can really &quot;get into it&quot;, 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.<p>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)

Link to paper: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;onlinelibrary.wiley.com&#x2F;doi&#x2F;full&#x2F;10.1002&#x2F;acp.3532" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;onlinelibrary.wiley.com&#x2F;doi&#x2F;full&#x2F;10.1002&#x2F;acp.3532</a>

I&#x27;m a classical singer and just all around lover of music.. I&#x27;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.

The problem is that the test subjects were listening to unfamiliar music. If they were listening to what they&#x27;re always listening to, they wouldn&#x27;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&#x27;t think it stifled my creativity in any way.

I 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.

I hate to see this. I really like music.<p>I guess when I&#x27;m doing something repetitive and manual (like painting a house), then some music is just a welcome distraction. But when I&#x27;m working on something that requires heavy brainpower (like debugging some failing computer process), then silence does seem to be best.

Indeed, 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).

Music 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&#x27;s testimony in the background on Wednesday. If they&#x27;re not fooling themselves about their productivity, I&#x27;m really jealous.

So what is the solution to drown out ambient noise for example a noisy work place?

If you&#x27;re listening to music&#x2F;watching Netflix during work, your work will probably be automated or outsourced

It&#x27;s funny the result sounds slightly controversial because music doesn&#x27;t have the bad rep that TV does. If the study&#x27;s conclusion was &quot;Watching TV significantly impairs creativity&quot;, everybody would be like &quot;d&#x27;oh!&quot;. However, listening to music is also an act of passive consumption, just like watching TV, so the result is not too surprising to me.

(Anecdote) music with lyrics impairs creativity. I think its because lyrics makes you think.