Is It Good To Listen To Music While Studying

Many students feel they need to listen to music while they study or revise, believing it helps them concentrate better. Some even say that without music, they can’t revise as it is too quiet. Others also feel it is distracting.

Advantages of studying with music

• listening to music can make you a happier person, as music releases pleasurable emotions and increases dopamine level. According to research, listening to music triggers the release of dopamine in our brains. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that promotes feelings of happiness and excitement. Being in a better mood likely means that we try that little bit harder and are willing to stick with challenging tasks. Study shows that that people may be better at solving problems when they are in a positive mood compared to when they are in a negative or neutral mood. Music that is relaxing also helps students with stress and anxiety, thus leading them to study more efficiently.

• music helps us that study for longer hours hence increasing endurance.

  Disadvantages of studying with music

• Several studies show that students who listen to music while completing tasks such as reading and writing tend to be less efficient, and don’t absorb much information compared to those who don’t listen to music. In addition, loud or ‘angry’ music has negative effects on reading comprehension, as well as mood. This makes them less efficient on the tasks.

• When you study, you’re using your working memory – that means you are holding and manipulating several bits of information in your head at once. Some clever work by an Australia-based researcher called Bill Thompson and his colleagues aimed to figure out the relative effect of these two competing factors - mood and distraction.

  They had participants do a fairly demanding comprehension task, and listen to classical music that was either slow or fast, and which was either soft or loud.

  They found the only time there was any real decrease in performance was when people were listening to music that was both fast and loud (that is, at about the speed of Shake It Off  by Taylor Swift, at about the volume of a vacuum cleaner).

  But while that caused a decrease in performance, it wasn’t actually that big a decrease. And other similar research also failed to find large differences.

In a nutshell listening to music while studying has benefits and can also be a distraction. Research suggest it’s probably fine to listen to music while you’re studying - with some caveats.

It’s better if:

• it puts you in a good mood

• it’s not too fast or too loud

• it’s less wordy (and hip-hop, where the words are rapped rather than sung, is likely to be even more distracting)

• you’re not too introverted.

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