Music and Attention — Brain Food

Welcome back to Brain Food! This is your one stop shop for all things psychology and/or the things on my mind that I find particularly interesting! If you stuck with me since the last post I want to give you my sincerest appreciation for wanting to read whatever it is that goes on up there in my brain stuff.

This week's Brain Food is about music! Particularly, the effect music has on our brains and how we focus.

Music has always been an extremely important part of my life. Not just playing it for however many years I have, but the act of listening to music has contributed to my development into the person I am today. Music is such a powerful tool and can be a catalyst for anything you can imagine. It can inspire, heal, and transport you to a totally different time and place. Certain songs can make you feel certain things, similar things even to the person who was writing it, or the person who showed it to you. Music is a beautiful way we can communicate with one another our most vulnerable thoughts and feelings, and then can even still shape and create new thoughts and feelings.

For example, lets pretend an artist named say, oh I don't know, Blink 182, writes a song because the members of the group miss someone who used to be in their lives. Let's say this song is called, for the sake of the argument, I Miss You, and they record it and play it all over the world. Your friend picks up the album, listens to the song and loves it because they're feeling something from that song, something that maybe they've experienced in the past that the song reminds them of, in addition to the song sounding melodic and pleasant to the ear. Your friend shows you the song and now you're connected to this feeling and experience with your friend as well as Blink 182. Then lets say later on you listen to the song with a significant other at a park or some other place that you two share a special moment. Now not only are you connected to three different parties, but you also create a place where the song can bring you back to anytime you listen to it in the future!

Okay I understand that was long and convoluted and probably wasn't easy to follow but I was attempting to convey how incredible it is that music can affect and reach so many different people and have such a visceral and profound effect on us. Music can get you through the hard times, provide the soundtrack to the good times and everything in between.

But I want to focus this post specifically on how music can attribute to focus and attention. Everyone knows that feeling after procrastinating a project or something you need to do until the last minute so finally you put on some music to concentrate and you get it done just before the deadline. Listening to music can also relax you and take you out of what you're doing so you don't have this obtrusive thought of "ugh this is the worst why do I have to do this" while you're doing the thing.

I know for me throughout college and my academic career, if I had to get a huge paper done I wouldn't be able to write it without listening to music. Specifically, I've found that instrumental music works astronomically better at allowing me to focus than music that has lyrics. This is because I often would find myself distracted by what the artist was saying and it would take me out of the subject matter for the assignment I needed to write. There is actually a lot of research to support this too! In a pilot study conducted in 2008 by Shih, Huang, and Chiang, it was found that when people listen to background music either before or during a task, it can raise that person's level of awareness and even enthusiasm about doing that task! So listening to Canon could make someone extremely eager to want to clean their house, or write a daunting paper.

This study also suggests that the type of music definitely could play a role in performance, as the group that listened to the music during the task had higher levels of variability in their ability to focus than the more consistent group of listening to the music prior to the task. This lends to the idea that music preference could play a factor. For example, if someone needed to write a paper and was listening to country music when they absolutely hate country music, that person would be so much more concerned with the fact that they're listening to country music that it would encourage them not engage in productive work. This is because they would be taking themselves out of the situation and start indulging in those wandering thoughts like "man I hate country music" or "this all sounds the same" instead of engaging in those productive thoughts like "the political situation in Africa is clearly indicative of the long term effects of western colonialism".

Another study done in 2010 by Perham and Vizard find that it's possible there is a connection between music preference and memory. If you listen to music that you enjoy during a task it increases your mood, causing you to be able to recall information better based on the mood-dependent memory model. This states that if when you encoded the information you were happy, you're more likely to recall it effectively when you are happy. The study also could suggest some evidence for the mood-congruent memory model. This is when the emotional content of the recalled information is congruent with your mood, you can recall it better and more efficiently. Because music can easily alter our mood, it can have a profound effect on our memory and our ability to recall information. So if you need to study vocabulary words or other items that you need to recall, listen to music that makes you happy during your memorization, so that later on when you're invariably extremely happy about regurgitating Latin words for a test, you'll be able to have better recall!

Both of these studies seem to indicate that it's actually more beneficial for you to listen to music that you enjoy a few minutes before doing a task than it is to listen to music while you do a task. This is because when you're trying to get something done and you're listening to music, your brain has to sort of spread itself thin and work extra hard on decoding the auditory stimuli in addition to trying to maintain focus and attention on the task you're doing. So that's why listening to music that has a lot of lyrics can actually distract you further than help you focus. Your brain is trying to decode and interpret all of the words that are being said while you try and recall information about a subject or complete a task that involves critical thinking. Have you ever been listening to a song while typing something and accidentally typed the lyrics to the song without realizing it? This is a reason why!

I hope this post wasn't too confusing, but it was an interesting topic! Stay tuned because next week I'm going to be tackling a subject that I have been interested in for a very long time: How the internet affects our brains and relationships. Thanks for sticking with me here at Brain Food!