Agronesia

I’ve heard or read about how listening to music can help enhance your study. They recommend soothing music without vocals like baroque or classical music.

For me, any kind of music is a distraction while studying. Music with vocals are especially so, since I find my brain instinctively try to tune into the voice more than to focus on the task at hand. Music without vocals are just the same, my brain tries to concentrate on the melodies!

Many people said that music helps them study. Well, that’s probably not the case actually. This article writes about an experiment that found about how listening to music reduces one’s performance on study. You know it makes sense right? You multitask your brain, so there must be some sacrifices.

However, music does bring pleasure. So for those who insist on using music while studying, it’s probably the choice between “having no mood to study and so no study at all” or “having a sustainable mood for study and so study with the performance penalty of music”. I for one can motivate myself to study quite well, so I don’t particularly need music for study mood bringer.

This of course also applies to work, since both are brain-related activities.

That’s not to say that I never multitask. When there is mundane task at hand, a simple but laborious task that I feel is not worth any human’s time, I fire my media player. An example is searching for a specific document amidst dozens of piles of paper. Most of the time though, when I do listen to music, it’s for the pure enjoyment of listening itself. But each to his own, do whatever you like as long as it hurts no one.

Tags: aid, appreciation, baroque, brain, classical music, concentration, distraction, enjoyment, learning, melody, music, note, pleasure, study, vocal, work

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 7:19 am by Agro Rachmatullah and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.