Instant Genius - How to enhance your focus with sound, with Dr Nick Perham

Episode Date: January 30, 2023

What music will improve your concentration most? Could the hubbub of a coffee shop increase your attention span? And what’s the deal with white noise? To answer all your questions about how to best use sound to boost your focus, we’re joined by Dr Nick Perham, reader in applied cognitive psychology at Cardiff Metropolitan University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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the bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. I'm Thomas Ling, digital editor at BBC Science Focus magazine. Now, if you're a productivity geek like me, you might have wondered what role sounds and music could have in improving concentration. For instance, we'll listening to certain types of music boost your focus? Could the background noise of a coffee shop increase your attention levels? Or should everyone be wearing earplugs at work? To answer these sonic quandaries and more, I'm joined by Dr Nick Perham, reader in Applied Cognitive Psychology at Cardiff Metropolitan University. I'm going to start with the big question first. What actually is concentration?

Okay, well, I would say it's people's ability to focus on a task and engage in the task for kind of as long as possible without making as many errors as they could do. And this arguably would vary between individuals. Certain individuals we know tend to be less susceptible to things like auditory distraction, which is sort of the research I engage with. Some people are more able to be distracted. So, no, there is a certain amount of inherent ability to do that, and some things can make it worse and some things can make it better. Okay. So if you are looking to concentrate on a really difficult to ask, is silence normally better? I would say generally, most of the studies that we run in the lab, silence produces the best performance. But it kind of depends on the task sometimes as well.

So the research I do is the main phenomenon, is something called the irrelevant sound effect. And the task we give people is called serial or equal, which is just the same as trying to recall a phone number that someone gives you and you've got nothing to write it down with. And obviously, if you get the numbers wrong, you've got the wrong phone number. So we give it. people are listed digits, maybe seven to nine digits, and they have to record them in the order in which they're presented. What you find is performance, as we just said, is much better and quiet. Where there's background sound, we have quite a bit of a drop in performance, maybe 30%, and it's usually where the sound has what we call acoustical variation,

or we call it changing state. So an example of changing state sounds or acoustically varying sounds as a speech, you and me talking, there's lots of different sound items, and we can separate each sound item and identify each sound item quite easily. In contrast, where there's lots of overlaps of different noise, we have less acoustical variation, and we call this steady state sound, and this produces less disruption. So you get what's called the classic irrelevant sound effect performance on the serial recall task, best performance and quiet. Steady state with less acoustical variation is roughly the same as quiet performance, but a lot worse is that changing state acoustical variation, which we find in many environments that we encounter.

So if you're working on more of a logical task, is there such thing as too much silence? So I have to confess a lot of the time when I'm working, I wear earplugs and noise-cancelling headphones at the same time. Is that a good idea or not? It will depend. It said the task is quite important. So there are some tasks that involve something called insight problem solving, where the solution to a problem just kind of occurs out of nowhere. And studies suggest that in quiet, you know, our mental thought process,

make that quite difficult. But where you have some distracting sounds or where you have sound in the background, that doesn't seem to be as bad for it. So in some cases, where you've got a task that involves us, you need some solution that comes out of nowhere, all your internal thoughts make it more difficult. So silence there is not quite as good. And then when you have the background sound, that seems to make it easier. But he said individually, there are lots of people who think that silence is best for them. And the lab studies does generally support that. So if you're working on more of a creative task, you're saying, is it better to have that kind of subtle background noise? There we go into another effect.

So creative tasks, there is something, I don't know if you've heard it, there's a phenomena called the Mozart effect, or it should be more probably called the mood and arousal effect. This was, I think it came to prominence in the early 90s. There was a publication in Nature magazine. And they found that people who listen to Mozart music, so they specifically, attended to the music, then they stopped, and then they did a creative task, a spatial reasoning task, a spatial rotation task. They were significantly better than those who listened to music, or attended to music that they disliked. And they argued that it was to do with Mozart. And then people found a Chopin effect, and then people find a Stephen King

effect, not that he was singing, it was the narration. So they argued it wasn't anything to do with Mozart, classical music or even music. It seemed to be something more to do with something to boost your levels of arousal. Now, there is a relationship between arousal and kind of some basic cognitive performance. So the more aroused you become, now, if you've just run a marathon or really stress, your arousal levels are so high that you're difficult to concentrate and focus on a task. Similarly, if you're under aroused, if you're asleep, someone wakes you up and gets you to do something, your arousal levels are quite low.

But if you get to, you know, your arousal levels are kind of optimum, on certain basic cognitive tasks, things like spatial rotation, your performance seems to be at its peak. the thing I'll mention about this, the phenomenon I've just described, that is a situation where you are attending to the music first, and when you do the task, it's in silence completely. So, yes, going back to your point, I know I've digress a little bit. Creative tasks, yes, can seem to be improved by listening to things, music you like before you do them.

So does it matter if this music is energetic, if you're listening to it just before you engage in whatever task it is? That's a good point. I suppose it depends if you're someone who likes that kind of music. that's fine. If you dislike energetic music, dance music, fast RPM, then chances are you're not going to be, your arousal levels might be a bit too much. We do find difference between introverts and extroverts. So if someone who's extrovert, their arousal levels are a little bit higher, they need more stimulation to reach their arousal levels. People who are more introverted, their arousal

levels are reached quite easily. Lots of music probably wouldn't be too beneficial for them. So if you really wanted to boost your performance in a certain task, how long before the task should you be listening to the music? music for, like, music that you like. And is there any sort of pause that you should have before engaging in your task? The studies that I've spoken about, it was just prior to doing the task. So they listened to Mozart for a few minutes, and then they engaged in the spatial rotation task. And I think it, I know, the results showed the kind of an increase in spatial IQ points by about, I think they said it lasted for about 15 minutes and an increase of about 10,

eight to 10 spatial IQ points. So yes, that's what that research seems to suggest. So if you're in the creative arts, something you need some creative task, listen to doing something you like that increases your eyes or levels of which listening to music that you like is good and should have a benefit. At first, I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light and I was transported to another place. Pluto TV. Then I heard a voice. Come with me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and shows, and they were all free. The truth is our sin. It's just so beautiful.

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if they're listening to music with lyrics in it. Why is that? So that's where you're completing your task and you've got the sound going on in the background. And the literature shows that when we're doing a task that involves us processing meaning, which we call semanticity, if we've got a background sound that also involves meaning, we get this conflict. It's quite difficult to ignore people speaking in a language that you understand

and you know the information for it. It kind of gets confused. We're trying to incorporate what we're trying to read, what we're trying to write, with all these other lyrics and words going on in the background that we're familiar with. So we do find effects with that. So even if it's just speech, we'll have that same effect, and especially with music with lyrics. The interesting thing is, you know, most people do say, well, I like listening to music, especially with lyrics. And they like singing along, but we know in a lab it does seem to impair performance.

Is that why most people turn down the car radio when they're looking for a parking spot? That's an interesting one. I've had that discussion of my students last week. It's something we will do. And I think people think we need to concentrate. But in terms of what's being affected, I'm not quite sure because when you're trying to park, you're not processing meaning of information. It's more of a spatial rotation. You're trying to concentrate on something else. So yeah, that's a bit of an unsolved question, I would say, but it's definitely something that many of us are familiar with.

How can music impact someone's short-term memory if they're performing a task? Well, if you go back to the irrelevant sound effect, the task that I said that we usually run is a serial recall task. I said trying to remember someone's phone number. it's a great example of a short-term memory task in that you're given information just prior to recalling it and you have to use your short-term memory to try and to remember what it is

and you generally use your rehearsal processes to do it. As I said, if you're someone who tried to give you a phone number and you had to remember it without being honest right, you'd kind of mutter it under your breath a few times until you remembered it. It's exactly what people seem to be doing in the lab. That seems to get affected by what I said, the acoustically varying sound, like speech.

music is another one of those type of sounds that contains most of the time acoustically varying sounds. So most of the music we listen to tends to be quite acoustically varying, quite interesting for us to listen to. Some music I listen to, some of the music I listen to, has less acoustical variation. So if you listen to things like death metal, grind vocal, things like that, there's less acoustical variation. And we published a study showing that an example of that didn't produce as much disruption as a song that people liked that had more acoustical variation. So would you recommend listening to metal music before engaging in a particularly difficult task then, or do you have to like that sort of music? Well, the study we show with the serial recall task, so cereal recall obviously isn't something

we tend to do on a daily basis trying to remember a series of seven or nine digits, something like that. But the process is underpinning it, are you trying to rehearse things in order, maybe something we do more often? So if you think of performing mental arithmetic, the way we try to ascend and descend the numerical scale, sometimes that involves us trying to mutter under a breath, trying to cross the tens boundary and do those mental arithmetic calculations. And studies have shown that changing state sound will affect that as well. Yes, so things that are less acoustically varying, like some music, don't seem to be as

impairing as music that people tend to like. If you're someone like me who likes that kind of music, then it's fine. But it's a little bit awkward for people who don't like the music. I understand that. So what about white noise? Can you explain what it is and how? how that might impact someone's concentration levels? White noise would be another example of a sound that has less acoustical variation.

We've all kind of experienced it, similar things like the old radio, the static electric and on the TV as well. So if you have that as background sound, that has a less acoustical variation, that impairs your performance less on these rehearsal-based tasks, similar to music that has lots of acoustical variation. It's not the most pleasant of things to listen to, but it tends to have the same effect. People don't like it as much as I said, though.

Would you recommend working in a coffee shop? I don't drink much coffee, so that wouldn't work for me. Well, I suppose I wouldn't be drinking it. I'd be selling it. I think you mean actually not being a barista. You mean actually doing to my coffee. Yes, I do you mean that, yes. Yes, I mean, coffee shop, lots of people like going to coffee shops,

not just for the coffee shop, but for the coffee, but for the kind of the ambience, the auditory environment. So what we would argue then is that you've got lots of different sounds, lots of different speech going on. And there's something called the Babel Effect, that when you have one person speaking, you get this disruption to a serial recall task, as I said, to do with this acoustically varying sounds. When you increase the number of people speaking up to about three or four, suddenly it changes from being quite acoustically varying to much less acoustical variation.

It's called the Babel effect, and you get less disruption. Also, with more people talking over each other, you can't really discern what one person's saying compared to an actually don't really hear the individual words. so you don't get that disruption from what the meaning of what people are saying is. So yes, go into a coffee shop where you've got lots of people speaking. You get this kind of general hubbub of noise. It's quite nice noise to listen to. You don't get all the acoustical variation.

You don't usually get all the speech that you can understand. What you might get now and again are cups being smashed on the floor and dropped in things. And that is an example of another auditory distraction phenomenon called deviance. So there's a deviance effect. and arguably this is more of an elie, an evolutionary, auditory distraction pharma that we share with lots of other hearing species

that when one sound item differs from all the others, it captures our attention. So someone calling your name, someone dropping the coffee, the mugs on the floor, that captures your attention, it alerts you. So potentially it's a way to alert you that something in your environment has changed and maybe you need to be aware of it. So if you think going back to thousands of years,

and when we're on the plains of the savannah and everything's fine, and we may have heard some kind of noise, it could be the difference between life or death. So you might have to think, okay, well, what is that noise? Is it something threatening? We do find deviance effects in laboratory studies as well. How can somebody limit these deviant sounds in their lives? You mentioned before about noise-cancelling headphones, and you're talking about white noise. So masking noise amongst other noise kind of helps.

As I said, I suffer a little bit with tinnitus, I think. So having music, from what I've read, music therapy or playing music, is helpful for people with tinnitus. It kind of massed the noise that they're hearing internally. And I wrote an article about the film A Quiet Place with John Crosinski and Emily Blunt. So that's the film where aliens have landed and they kill everyone, but they've got very, very good hearing. So the human beings shouldn't make any sound.

So John Crosinski character is talking to his son, but obviously he doesn't want to make a sound. So he goes under a waterfall to talk to him. So that any sound he makes is mass by all the waterfall sounds. so the aliens can't hear him. So that's part of the reason I wrote that article. So yes, deviant signs can be masked, I think, by having other signs around it as well. It sounds out a lot more when it's very different to the other signs, unfortunately. Well, fortunately, really, because we need to be alert to these things. So how can we learn to concentrate better? What are

some top tips that you have? I think working in quiet is a better way or, as well, I've said, sounds that have less acoustical variation. So white noise might not be the easiest thing to find. And people might not listen to death metal, for example. But some classical music sometimes helpful. People choose going to coffee shops. I think people generally are aware of how well they work. Well, they think they know how well they work.

So like you said before, when you've got music on with lyrics, you know that you're someone who's kind of, I'm going to start singing along to that. So if you feel that's the kind of thing you do, probably not a good idea to put it on whilst you're working. You know, you have a, you know, trust your own judgment on that, what I'd say. What's some of the most interesting emerging areas of research in your field? There's a kind of debate in, well, the one thing I'm interested in is the individual differences that certain individuals might have greater or less susceptibility to order to distraction.

There isn't so much research on this. There's certain research showing that people who have a greater working memory capacity tend to be less vulnerable to that deviance effect. So working memory is kind of how we store and manipulate information. There's a wide range of abilities in this. People who tend to have good working memory capacity tend to school higher in intelligence tests, not saying that intelligence tests are about working memory, but there is a relationship between the two. And those who have greater working memory capacity tend to be better able to prevent being distracted. They can inhibit that information better.

So is there no way of telling at the moment how you can improve your strength to audio distractions? There is some research showing that if you decrease the difference between what you're trying to read, the target information and the background, your relevant sound effect, your disruption by the sound becomes less. So what they're kind of arguing is that implicitly, without any effort on your part, you end up in a sense concentrating more because you can't quite see it as much. I mean, ultimately, if we take that to its ultimate conclusion, if you have the background the same contrast as what you're trying to read,

you'll never be able to read it. So you won't get any disruption from the sign, but that's not the point there. So, yes, there seems to be shown a slight change in the difference between what you're trying to focus on and the background is that will protect you a little bit from disruption from background sound. That was Dr Nick Perham from Cardiff Metropolitan University, talking about how music and sound impacts your concentration. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instantjointed.

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