= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Vladimir_Nesov comments on Working Mantras - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (57)
If anyone does have studies to hand I'd be grateful for references.* I personally find it difficult to work without music. That may be habit as much as anything else, though I expect part of the benefit is due to shutting out other, more distracting noise. I've noticed negative effects on my productivity on the rare occasions I've listened to music with lyrics, but that's about it.
* I'd be especially grateful for anything that looks at how much individual variation there is in the effect of music.
Do you rely mostly on visual imagination?
Sometimes, but it varies quite a lot depending on exactly what I'm doing. The only correlation I've noticed between the effect of music and work-type is that the negative effect of lyrics is more pronounced when I'm trying to write.
Of course, it's entirely possible that I'm just not noticing the right things - which is why I'd be interested in references.
The idea is that when you are listening to music, you are handicapping yourself by taking some of the attention of the aural modality. If you are used to rely on it in your thinking, this makes you impaired.
This is related to an experiment that Feynman describes in this video:
Feynman 'Fun to Imagine' 11: Ways of Thinking
In the experiment, you need to count in your mind, while doing various activities. That attention was really paid to the counting is controlled by you first calibrating and then using the counting process to predict when exactly a minute has passed. Thus, you can't cheat, you have to really go on counting.
Feynman himself says that he was unable to speak while counting, as he was "speaking" and "hearing" these numbers in his mind. Another man he asked to do the experiment had no difficulty speaking, but was unable to read: he then explained that he was counting visually.
I tried it both ways, and the difference shows in different speeds of counting in these modes which are hard to synchronize (and so just switching between them doesn't work very well).
Thanks for the explanation.
I'd heard something similar from a friend who majored in psychology, but they explained it in terms of verbal processing rather than auditory processing more generally, which is why (they said) music without words wasn't as bad.
I'm not sure whether it's related, but I've also been told by a number of musically-trained friends that they can't work with music at all, because they can't help but analyse it as they listen: for them, listening seems to automatically involve processing work that it doesn't (seem to) for me, precisely because I'm not capable of such processing. (This was part of the reason I was originally wondering about individual variation; the point you make at the end is really interesting in this regard too.)
In a possibly-related anecdote, I can't listen to music I've played in Guitar Hero while working, as my mind switches into Guitar Hero mode and all I see are streams of colored buttons.
I find that very interesting too, since I am in fact the opposite of your musically-trained friends: I am quite rubbish at anything musical, am hard-of-hearing, and have great difficulty analysing music & songs. (In part that's why I listen to so much J-pop: since I often can't understand the lyrics even if they're in English...)