Listening to music when studying or doing work is a very common habit among university students . In libraries, many people choose to ignore the fragile and artificial silence that surrounds the tables and shelves, isolating themselves from the outside by using headphones and a pleasant melody.

The same is true in some offices, although in that context isolating yourself from others is more problematic if you work in a team or in a large office with open cubicles. Whether or not they are isolated, however, the factor common to these people is that they see music as a tool that can improve concentration , productivity and task accomplishment in general.

But… Does music really help us to concentrate better on what we are doing, whether it is memorizing a text, studying about complex issues or writing projects?

Music in Repetitive Tasks

Scientific studies have been carried out on this subject for many decades; among other reasons because if music can be used to improve the performance of students or workers, this information can be very useful for organizations capable of financing this kind of study.

Thus, for example, a research whose results were published in 1972 was designed to try to better understand the relationship between listening to tunes and changes in productivity . Through a series of observations, an increase in workers’ performance was recorded when they listened to music coming from loudspeakers.

However, this research was a child of its time, and was used to study only one very concrete and representative work context of that time: that of the factories. The tasks of the work force were repetitive, predictable and boring , and music acted as a stimulant of mental activity. As the work was more pleasant and enjoyable, the results in productivity were also better.

Other research that came later served to reinforce the idea that music improves the performance of routine and monotonous tasks. This was good news, as much of the workforce was involved in assembling elements on assembly lines, but… what about the more complex and creative jobs , those that cannot be done by machines? what about the study of complex university syllabuses, that cannot be literally memorized but need to be understood and worked on mentally?

When the task is complicated, silence is better

It seems that when the task at hand requires us to really concentrate on what we are doing, the presence of music is a burden we should avoid.

For example, research published in Psychological Reports found that when volunteers were asked to count backwards by listening to a piece of music of their choice, those who did so while playing the chosen piece did significantly worse than those who had no choice and simply performed the task without listening to music.

Many other investigations are along the same lines: the most catchy melodies or those that the person likes have devastating effects on performance when studying or performing moderately complex mental operations , especially if the music has lyrics in a language that is understood.

In other words, even if you use music to study, this may be simply because you like that music, not because it improves your memorization and learning results. These tunes are heard in spite of the effects this has on performance, not because of their effectiveness in that context.

Why isn’t it good to listen to music while studying?

The answer lies in two concepts: multitasking and attentional focus. Multitasking is the ability to perform more than one task in parallel, and is closely related to working memory . This type of memory is in charge of keeping in our minds elements that we work with in real time. What happens is that this kind of RAM memory of our brain is very limited, and it is believed that it can only serve to manipulate between 4 and 7 elements at the same time.

Attentional focus is the way in which the brain directs mental processes towards solving some problems and not others. When we concentrate on something we make a large part of our nervous system start working to solve it, but for this we have to pay the price of neglecting other functions .

That is why, for example, if we are walking down the street thinking about something, we often find ourselves taking a detour to continue walking along one of the routes we usually follow: the route to work, the route to the bus stop, etc.

But the problem of attention focus is not only that it can only cover certain processes and not others.We must also take into account that we do not always have total control over it, and it can deviate from what we should be doing very easily.

Music, in particular, is one of the great lures to which attention is accustomed to succumb ; it is tremendously easy for the attentional focus to become detached from the study or the performance of complex mental operations to move on to recreate the appreciation of the melody and the verses it contains.

The motor memory

So, for those more challenging tasks it is best not to disturb our focus of attention by presenting it with a distracting temptation in the form of catchy music and understandable lyrics. But then… why in monotonous tasks this effect is not noticed?

The answer is that a good part of the processes we carry out when attending to routine tasks are managed by a part of our brain that is fulfilling its objectives without the attention focus having to intervene in it.

Specifically, the motor memory , mediated by encephalic structures known as basal ganglia, is responsible for a large part of these automated action sequences. Just look at the way people who have been working for years to fit parts together on an assembly line work: they may work so fast that it seems very difficult, but in reality they do not even concentrate enough to do it.

With studies, the opposite is true. If certain university courses are difficult, it is precisely because studying them implies facing unforeseen problems constantly, and these cannot be minimized by using a simple melody.

Conclusion: depends on the type of content to be studied

The effect that music has on our ability to study varies according to the complexity of the contents we have to learn .

For the more mechanical and monotonous tasks, which are those in which we can always be guided by the same system of memorization (for example, associating a name to each river located on a map), music can make us make greater progress, although this will not happen in all cases and there are certain personal psychological characteristics that also have an influence, such as the ease with which each person manages his or her attentional focus.

However, if music helps to study in these cases it is not because it “dope” our intelligence momentarily or anything like that, but simply because it makes that activity more enjoyable and we stay in it longer, without looking for distractions outside.

However, for the most complicated tasks, in practically all cases listening to music is counterproductive and hinders the action of studying. This is because for this type of activity we need to take total control of our attentional focus , so that distractions do not diminish our capacity to “mentally operate” on the contents that we must assimilate. Even if we don’t notice it, listening to a melody