iPod on. iPod off.

(thomashawk @ Flickr)

I often wondered whether those little buds in my ears delivering a soothing wave of music were helping or hindering my revision. So I did a bit of detective work.

The results? Broadly speaking, music is a bit of a cognitive criminal, stealing precious resources away. Music with lyrics is the worst, as it soaks up important language processing.

But listening to it before work can improve your mood and your cognitive prowess. So music that makes you smile is good before work; after that silence is golden.

So it's iPod on before work, iPod off when you start.

If you are anything like me and get distracted by tiny things like a dripping tap down the road, I suggest getting some earplugs. I have stuck a permanent link on the side bar (under 'Previous Goodies') to the site where I bought a load for my revision.

For people who wondered how I came to this conclusion or just want to burn some more time before getting back into the revision canoe, read on...

In 1993, Rauscher, Shaw and Ky reported the finding that listening to a Mozart piano sonata (K. 448) enhanced spatial test performance in adults for a period of 15 minutes after presentation.

This was dubbed the "Mozart effect" (Knox, 1993) and was inaccurately transmuted into public understanding as 'listening to Mozart makes your cleverer'.

Laughably, this distortion of the evidence led to a cottage industry being set up for parents who wanted their kids to be smarter as well as the misbegotten policy in the state of Georgia to send new babies Mozart CDs.

Unfortunately the evidence only points towards better mental rotation abilities (meta-analysis by Hetland, 2000) and this may only be due to the music putting you in a better mood for cognitive tasks (Schellenberg & Hallam, 2005; or here). Mozart isn't really important either (Smith, Osborne, Mann, Jones, & White, 2004).

Banbury, Macken, Tremblay, and Jones (2001) and Beaman (2005, review) have shown that there is a cost to 'auditory distraction' although some people aren't affected by it (Neath et al., 2003).

Added to that, Oswald et al. (2000) among others (Neely & LeCompte, 1999; Jones et al., 1990; Martin et al.,1988) have shown that meaningful speech not directly related to the task at hand is distracting.

Salamé and Baddeley (1989) report that music with speech is more cognitively disruptive to short term recall than speechless music (which still had a negative effect, just a smaller one). As information needs to go through short term memory in order to get into long term memory this can't be a good thing.

Binaural beats

burnblue @ Flickr

This will only be of interest to a fraction of geeks, like myself, who like really fringe stuff.

When two sounds with two different frequencies are played in stereo (i.e. to each ear), binaural beats are heard. These aren't real but equal to the difference between the stereo frequencies. You can listen to one here (headphones needed, toggle between each ear to see the effect vanish).

There are several companies that claim such binaural beats improve mental functioning and memory by reverse engineering brain frequencies via the audio. Naturally, the combined simplicity and complexity of this idea caught certain people's imagination, to the point that a musician-physicist mate of mine wondered it there was anything to it last year during exams.

There isn't. In this recent study binaural beats had zero effect on brain frequencies and, what is more, participants in the experimental group were more forgetful and more depressed than controls. Cognitive neuroscience, one. New Age monkeys, nil.

(If you want to see more on music and revision, see this post.)

Soul balm

I have blogged about listening to music during revision here. The headline: don't do it.

But for when you're not revising and feel like relaxing, I have created tag-mashup playlist (basically, automatically selected songs based on descriptions) of hopefully emollient music that you can stream from the 'music cloud', courtesy of the great LastFM. I haven't listened to each song, so no judging me! It's now over there on the side now, underneath the book store >>>

There are about 150 tracks in there at the mo, which the widget wont show. It plays a shuffled selection from this. Refresh the page to re-shuffle. If you would like a track added, just write who it's by and what it's called in the comments and I'll add it.