Listening To Music Can Weaken Your Creative Skills, Says Study

According to a new study, listening to music will considerably impair people’s ability to complete creative tasks. Earlier, the popular read that music enhances ability has been challenged by researchers who say it's the alternative result. During this study, psychologists from the University of Central Lancashire, the University of Gävle in Kingdom of Sweden and Lancaster University investigated the impact of background music on performance by presenting folks with verbal insight issues that are believed to faucet ability.

The results of the study were published within the journal ‘Applied Psychology: an International Review’. The researchers found that background music “significantly impaired” people’s ability to complete tasks testing verbal ability - however, there was no result for background library noise.

For example, a participant was shown 3 words (e.g., dress, dial, flower), with the necessity being to seek out one associated word (in this case “sun”) which will be combined to create a typical word or phrase (i.e., sundress, timekeeper and sunflower).

The researchers used 3 experiments involving verbal tasks in either a quiet setting or whereas exposed to background music with foreign (unfamiliar) lyrics, music while not lyrics, music with acquainted lyrics. “We found sturdy proof of impaired performance once taking part in background music compared to quiet background conditions,” aforementioned researcher and Dr Neil McLatchie.

Researchers recommended that this could be as a result of music disrupts verbal memory. The third experiment - exposure to music with acquainted lyrics- impaired ability in spite of whether or not the music additionally boosted mood, induced a positive mood, was likeable by the participants, or whether or not participants usually studied within the presence of music.

However, there was no important difference in performance of the verbal tasks between the quiet and library noise conditions. Researchers aforementioned that this is often as a result of library noise may be a “steady state” setting that isn't as tumultuous.

To conclude, the findings challenge the popular view that music enhances the ability and instead demonstrate that music, in spite of the presence of linguistics content (no lyrics, acquainted lyrics or unfamiliar with lyrics), systematically disrupts artistic performance in insight problem-solving.

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