Print“How can you study like that? Shut that off!” That’s what my mom always shouted from outside my door when I lay sprawled on my carpet, buried deep in a chemistry book as I tapped my pencil to the beat of “Genie in a Bottle.” I can’t count the number of times that the top 250 hits of the 1990s have gotten me through midterms and finals relatively unscathed.
Scan any given room in a library during finals, and you’ll see the majority of students sporting earbuds while engrossed in their textbooks. While practically all of us listen to music as we study, the idea is a little counterintuitive: you’re asking your brain to process two things at once but expecting it to remember only one of those things. So why do so many of us play music and study at the same time? Why do we even have trouble studying without music? And what about those who don’t or can’t listen to music while studying? Is one group learning more than the other, or is this variation just due to the different ways our brains work?
“It really depends on what I’m studying,” explains Kristin Moore, a Columbia College junior, when asked if she listens to music while hitting the books. “If I’m reading, I can’t listen to music because I won’t pay attention; I may even start singing. But if it’s something like a problem set, definitely. I am not really sure why, though.” Moore’s response is typical—when asked, most students say that if they are only reading, they can’t listen to music or they’ll be distracted. “Sometimes it feels like I have to listen to music, though, for the same reason I can’t study in Butler—I need some kind of background noise … I can’t stand it being so quiet,” Moore continues.
Her statement seems contradictory, especially with my mother’s voice still ringing in the back of my head. Isn’t quiet exactly what we need to focus properly? But the evidence seems to suggest otherwise: out of 50 students I polled, 42 of them generally prefer to study with music playing.
The type of music we play, however, varies greatly. Three Barnard sophomores sitting in the Butler lounge, for example—all plugged into their laptops as they study—are listening to vastly different genres. “I tend to listen to music in Spanish so that I’m not distracted by lyrics,” says one. The second prefers “The Beatles—all day, every day.” The third just uses Pandora and “lets that take care of it for me.” And Aliko Carter, a Columbia College junior, specifies that if he’s reading a book, “it has to be instrumental.” With such a broad spectrum of preferences and practices, how can we predict why we tend to listen to music while studying?
Though the Columbia psychology professors I contacted couldn’t be reached, Claire Jennings, Ph.D., a neuroscientist, does have a few answers. “It’s all rather logical … why many of us submit to such practices [listening to music while studying],” she explains. “You described it as ‘counterintuitive,’ but really, it makes sense.” Some shallow studies, she says, conclude that listening to music is detrimental because it forces the brain to focus on two things at once. Jennings, though, describes these studies as simply “false.”
The reason we listen to music while studying is actually to reduce the amount of input into our brain, Jennings explains. “If you’re sitting in the library and you hear people walking in, opening their bag, coughing, maybe the buzzing of someone’s cell phone in their pocket,” she says, all of that noise actually diverts attention away from the material a hand. We listen to music to block it all out.
As for our divergent musical preferences while studying, “it really does depend from person to person. But there are clear patterns,” says Jennings. I tend to listen to ’90s pop, she tells me, because it’s familiar to me—these are the songs I grew up listening to. Different people are familiar with different genres, which accounts for our preferred study music. “I dare you to listen to something brand new and try to study,” Jennings says. “It would be even more difficult that hearing all those people moving around and doing whatever in the library.”
The people who listen to classical or instrumental music while reading—or don’t listen to anything at all—do so because of the way memories are stored while reading, she explains. “When we read something for the first time it requires many sections of our brains,” says Jennings. “You need to process vocabulary, grammar, and then sort out the information behind the words and store that. That’s a lot for one brain to do!” It’s also nearly impossible while words stream in from iTunes.
That said, listening to music with lyrics does work for some people. “Music triggers something different in each of us, so there really is no rule for any of it,” Jennings clarifies. She does agree, though, that the more familiar a song or album or playlist is, the less it will distract us, and the more distraction drowning capability it has. So feel free to whip out those earbuds, dig out “Now 11,” and head to Butler.
Or avoid distractions in more creative ways: When I ask one girl in Butler what she’s listening to right now, she replies by saying, “Oh, I’m not actually listening to anything. I can’t study with music playing. I just put them in so no one tries to talk to me. It usually works.”