Background sound for focus and study
Some people work best in silence. Others concentrate better in a café, or with rain playing. Both can be true, and research gives a few useful pointers about why.
What distracts: words
The best-established finding is that speech you can understand gets in the way, even when you are trying to ignore it. Psychologists call this the "irrelevant speech effect". In classic experiments (Salamé and Baddeley, 1982), background speech made people worse at remembering lists, even though they were told to ignore it. The same applies to song lyrics: your brain processes words whether you want it to or not.
That is why an open-plan office or a housemate's phone call is so hard to work through, and why a sound without words can help: it covers the speech, so there is less for your brain to latch onto.
What can help: steady, moderate sound
- One well-known study (Mehta, Zhu and Cheema, 2012) found that a moderate level of background noise, roughly the level of a busy café, helped people on creative tasks compared with a quiet room. A loud level made them worse.
- Some research suggests background noise can help some children with attention difficulties on memory tasks (Söderlund and colleagues, 2007), while making things slightly worse for others. The effect seems to depend on the person.
Taken together: don't expect noise to make you smarter. It is most useful for blocking distractions, and the right level is moderate, not loud.
Setting up sound for work
- Pick something without words and without surprises. Rain, pink noise, a stream or a train ride all work well.
- If people are talking nearby, try white or pink noise, which cover the pitch range of voices best.
- Keep it moderate. Loud enough to blur the distractions, quiet enough to forget it's there.
- Use it as a signal. Playing the same scene every time you start work can become a cue that it's time to focus.
- Save your mix. Once you find a level you like, save it under My mixes so it's one click next time.
If it isn't working
If sound makes it harder to concentrate, that's a real result, not a failure: some people simply work better in quiet. Try earplugs or noise-cancelling headphones without any sound, and compare.
Sources
- Salamé, P. and Baddeley, A. (1982). Disruption of short-term memory by unattended speech. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 21(2).
- Mehta, R., Zhu, R. and Cheema, A. (2012). Is noise always bad? Exploring the effects of ambient noise on creative cognition. Journal of Consumer Research, 39(4).
- Söderlund, G., Sikström, S. and Smart, A. (2007). Listen to the noise: noise is beneficial for cognitive performance in ADHD. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 48(8).