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What Listening to Music at Work Does to Your Brain (It's Pretty Amazing)
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When music helps productivity
- A noisy workplace makes your brain consume extra energy to process the noise. This reduces productivity for tasks in general. Thus listening to music can help, as it blocks out other inputs.
- Listening to music you like while doing repetitive, and even complex, tasks may increase performance and accuracy. The music you enjoy makes your brain release neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine, which help you feel relaxed and happy and, therefore, focus and cooperate better.
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When music doesn't help with productivity
- Learning requires your brain to analyze and remember information. Listening to music while learning adds an extra load of processing and this can lead the brain to misinterpret or miss important information.
- When you listen to music that's new to you, the activity involves an element of surprise or novelty. Your body releases dopamine in response to this, causing you to feel some degree of pleasure, and that may divert your attention.
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Music between tasks could boost productivity
Although there may be detrimental effects of listening to music while working, listening to music in between tasks can boost your mental performance and the ability to concentrate on a task ...
Music familiarity is best for focus
Certain regions in our brain—which evoke strong emotions and improve concentration—are more active when we listen to familiar rather than unfamiliar music.
Plus, when we listen to unfamiliar music we’re more likely to lose focus, while adjusting to the new sound.
Music and repetitive tasks
Music can make repetitive tasks more pleasurable and increase your concentration on the task.
For example, one study discovered that music could improve the performance of surgeons who take on repetitive nonsurgical laboratory tasks.
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Music and productivity
During World War II, the BBC broadcasted upbeat music in factories twice a day to see if it might step up the pace of work and get the military what they needed. It worked. One report stated th...
Music and motivation
Playing the right music in the office motivates staff.
When you're concentrating, you'll want calmer, more relaxing music. At the end of the day, when you're feeling tired, you'll desire more upbeat music.
The benefits of music
There are two possible ways music might be beneficial while working:
- It makes us feel good, therefore helping us to work through otherwise tedious tasks.
- It makes us smarter. The Mozart effect is a well-known example - that listening to a piano sonata composed by a genius can make you perform better.
Some famous composers' work has better cognitive benefits than others. Studies show that Mozart's sonata increased "alpha band" brain waves, which is linked to memory, cognition, and problem-solving.
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How your brain handles data
For example, in a meeting, you could be processing:
- what happened in your last meeting with her;
When you're stressed
If during a meeting, you perceive an emotional threat, your brain will release stress hormones that will attempt to remove complexity from the situation. These stress chemicals will flush out bits of data that seem unimportant.
If just one bit of data is flushed out of your rational brain, you will be left with 120 options. (5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 120). It effectively means that you just lost 600 possibilities.
Higher-order thinking
When your creative, higher-order thinking fades due to stress, all you are left with is binary thinking; Yes-no, now-or-never thinking. This makes it impossible to be innovative or to engage in any form of value creation.
You can get back to the 720 possibilities by restoring your higher-order thinking.