Does Listening to Music While Working Make You Less Productive?
In a previous column about the stress of working in an “open” office, I
suggested that the popular practice of listening to music with earbuds
or headphones not only cuts down on background noise but may also give
employees a sense of control over their aural environment. But does
having a constant soundtrack to your day also distract you from the task
at hand? That depends on the task. Research shows that under some
conditions, music actually improves our performance, while in other
situations music makes it worse — sometimes dangerously so.
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Absorbing
and remembering new information is best done with the music off,
suggests a 2010 study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology. Adults
aged 18 to 30 were asked to recall a series of sounds presented in a
particular order. Participants’ performance suffered when music was
played while they carried out the task as compared to when they
completed the task in a quiet environment. Nick Perham, the British
researcher who conducted the study, notes that playing music you like
can lift your mood and increase your arousal — if you listen to it
before getting down to work. But it serves as a distraction from
cognitively demanding tasks.
That finding is key to understanding
another condition under which music can improve performance: when a
well-practiced expert needs to achieve the relaxed focus necessary to
execute a job he’s done many times before. A number of studies have
found, for example, that surgeons often listen to music in the operating
room and that they work more effectively when they do. A study in the
Journal of the American Medical Association reported that surgeons
carrying out a task in the laboratory worked more accurately when music
that they liked was playing. (Music that they didn’t like was second
best, and no music was least helpful of all.)
The doctors
listening to their preferred music were also the most relaxed, as
revealed by measurements of their nervous system activity. Still,
surgeons might want to ask others in the operating room for their
opinions on playing music: one survey of anaesthetists found that about a
quarter felt that music “reduced their vigilance and impaired their
communication with other staff,” and about half felt that music was
distracting when they were dealing with a problem with the anesthesia.
(And who would want to be the patient in that situation?)
Research
suggests that singing along might even heighten the distraction. A
study presented earlier this month at the International Conference on
Traffic and Transport Psychology, reported that singing along with music
in a car may slow drivers’ responses to potential hazards. Christina
Rudin-Brown, a Canadian researcher who studies the role of “human
factors” in traffic snafus, asked the participants in her experiment to
learn the lyrics to “I’m a Believer,” as performed by the band Smash
Mouth, and “Imagine,” as performed by John Lennon. Singing these songs
while operating a simulated car increased drivers’ mental workload,
leading them to scan their visual field less often and to focus instead
on the road right in front of them.
Other iPod rules drawn from
the research: Classical or instrumental music enhances mental
performance more than music with lyrics. Music can make rote or routine
tasks (think folding laundry or filing papers) less boring and more
enjoyable. Runners who listen to music go faster. But when you need to
give learning and remembering your full attention, silence is golden.