Who said listening to music while learning something is distracting? Few people know, but there is a genre of music that is ideal for studying. Even writing an essay with it is a pleasure. Well, of course, the help of proofreading academic papers will never be superfluous. Let's look at trend music for learning.

Music helps you feel alive

From an evolutionary point of view, the nature of the pleasure of listening to music is quite complex. A neurologist and musician, Jamshed Bharucha, noted that creative pursuits, particularly music, help a person "synchronize" in society, including improving teamwork. And this was important for the survival of man as a species.

A study was conducted on this topic: two groups of 24 children were shown toy frogs and told that they could be awakened by singing a song or showing an exercise. Children from the first group sang a song to the frogs, and from the second - walked and crawled around the toys. The children were then given tubes with glass balls, which soon scattered all over the floor. As a result, the children who sang the song helped each other to collect the balls much more. A simple experiment showed that music develops a sense of community, which was especially important at the dawn of humanity.

Does music help me do my job better?

Music is very helpful if you need to do boring and uninteresting things. In addition, your favorite music makes work more enjoyable, which means you can concentrate better and get things done faster. A study by the journal Neuroscience of Behavior and Physiology found that a person's ability to recognize images, letters, and numbers improves when listening to classical or rock music.

Similarly, music affected conveyor workers - they felt better and made fewer mistakes.

As can be seen from research, music has a beneficial effect on the performance of boring and monotonous tasks. However, when learning something new, such as the first lessons in driving school or when writing the first lines of program code, it is better to turn off the music.

In 2010, the University of Wales Institute proved this in a study when a group of people were given a rather difficult task to memorize and reproduce sounds in a certain order. Subjects coped better with the task in silence.

Music has a positive effect on your work if you are an expert in your field, even if it is as complex as surgery. If you do something familiar, even complex, music will improve performance and reduce the likelihood of error.

Musical background for concentration

It is most convenient to study the effect of music on concentration on the example of people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). ADHD is usually diagnosed in childhood, so research is mainly conducted on children - it is believed that by adulthood, most "outgrow" this syndrome. However, recently the diagnosis of ADHD has become more accurate, and it turned out that almost 5% of adults face the problem of attention deficit. So here are the two music ranking leaders for concentration.

White noise

It is a monotonous sound with an even distribution of high, middle and low frequencies, in which all the sounds are merged together and it is impossible to distinguish a certain rhythm. An example is the hum of a waterfall. Thanks to the wide coverage of sound frequencies, white noise well masks any acoustic stimuli. They just "drown" in its flow.

And what do the experiments show? The researchers played records of white noise in children with ADHD and their peers without the syndrome, and then gave them memory tests. The result was unexpected: in children with attention deficit, white noise stimulation improved cognitive functions, and in the control group, on the contrary, worsened.

In ADHD, the metabolism of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is responsible for motivation, is impaired, which causes problems with focusing just when performing long and routine tasks. And white noise compensates for the weaknesses of motivation associated with dopamine deficiency. So you can try to include such records during work to overcome procrastination.

Binaural rhythms

The idea of ​​binaural rhythms is simple: prolonged listening to music with a certain frequency resonates with the rhythms of the brain and adjusts its electrical activity to the same frequency. In terms of work, we are interested in three frequency bands.

Theta rhythm (4-8 Hz): corresponds to the state of meditation and creative activity.

Beta rhythm (14-30 Hz): increased attention, mental stress, emotional arousal.

Gamma rhythm (from 30 to 120-170 Hz): increased concentration when solving problems that require maximum concentration.

In practice, it looks like this: sounds with different frequencies are fed into the ears through headphones. The calculation is that the brain itself must compensate for this difference by creating a third "intermediate" rhythm (also called "illusory") and thus tune in to the frequency you need. For example, in the right ear you hear a melody with a frequency of 110 Hz, in the left - 120 Hz. And your brain based on the difference between them creates an additional rhythm with a frequency of 10 Hz. In reality, it is a very low sound, barely discernible to the human ear. However, studies show that it has a positive effect on the brain.