In the process of studying, working or creating, many people prefer to put music in the background. It is believed to increase a person's productivity and creativity, but new research has shown that this assumption is incorrect. To prove this, psychologists from the University of Lancaster and other educational institutions set up an experiment in which volunteers were given a task, to solve which you need to show maximum creativity. Each group of people completed the task under different conditions - the results were quite unexpected.
Three different words were spoken to several groups of volunteers, such as dress, dial and flower. The participants were required to find an associative word (in this case, “sun” is perfect) and combine it with the old words to get new words - sundress, sundial and sunflower. One of the groups took up the task in complete silence, and the three groups were divided into different rooms with different music.
The researchers included three types of music:
- Familiar with popular lyrics;
- Unfamiliar, with foreign words;
- Instrumental, without words.
To everyone's surprise, all three groups of people performed much worse than the volunteers from the quiet room. In the case of familiar music, people's creativity weakened depending on what mood the music conveyed and whether they liked it. The researchers believe that this result was due to the fact that music disrupts verbal working memory.
It is noteworthy that the study also involved people who performed the task in a noisy library. Their results were almost identical to those obtained in a quiet room. The researchers believe that the noise did not interfere with people due to the fact that it is a fairly stable state of the environment, which is no longer confusing.
Ramis Ganiev
