Listening to Music While Studying Is Not Good for Your Brain

Many people likes to study while listening to music, watching television or listening to the radio. But actually studying while listening to music is not good for your brain.

Recent research shows that the habit of students who like to listen to music when studying brings negative effect on the brain.

Studying while listening to music, is not appropriate, because the background music can affect the brain’s ability to perform tasks related to memory, which in turn also affects concentration.

A research that has been published in the Applied Cognitive Psychology journal, conducted by asking participants to remember the eight data in sequence. This research was conducted at five different conditions, namely a quiet neighborhood, played music that was liked,  music that is not liked, the data which is not stable (random order) and the data which is stable.

The result, participants’ ability to remember is bad when they are in a condition of listening to  music, weather it is music they like or dislike. While the best memories happened while they are in a quiet environment with a fixed or stable data.

“The participants’ low memory when listening to music and experiencing random data is due to variations in the acoustic environment. It is destroying the ability to remember the sequence data and repetition,” said Nick Perham, researcher and lecturer at the School of Psychology, University of Wales Institute in Cardiff, according to Health24.

Perham explained that to remember data, the ability to maintain control of information in short-term, which is through memory repetition, is also needed.

But this will not occur when the learning environment or a place to remember  experience acoustic variations, or sound changes like with background music.

“When you study to memorize, then find a quiet environment,” Perham recommends.

However, other studies show that listening to certain sounds such as lecture materials during sleep can actually improve memory. In fact, to take advantage of these findings, a pillow that comes with speakers is no produced so people can sleep while listening to music or lecture materials.