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FINALS GUIDE / MONDAY, MAY 10, 2010 / THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN / KANSAN.COM
Listening to music can be both helpful and distracting
BY SARAH MCCABE
smmcabe@kansan.com
Finals week is quickly approaching, which means one last week of sleepless nights and massive amounts of caffeine.
Everyone studies a different way. Some need snacks. Some need the library. And others need music to break up the silence. Kaitlyn Perry, a freshman from Auburn, is only one example.
"I listen to Girl Talk while studying, so it's just one long song," she said. "I kind of freak out without music."
Some students can't even turn on music for five minutes without instantly being distracted from the task at hand.
"I can't read and listen to music at the same time," said Sarah Thomas, an Overland Park junior. "I start to read the lyrics, not my homework."
So does listening to music help students study, or does it damage students' ability to remember important information? According to Dr. Stephen Iardi, a clinical psychology professor, the answer is surprisingly both.
"The biggest task for a human while studying is committing new information to memory," said llardi. He said the human body can only synthesize so much information at a time.
"When a person listens to music, it is being
processed along with their limited learning capacity," he said. "Music presents us with sets of temporal patterns, and we get enjoyment from detecting patterns and deviations from those patterns. If we are studying, we are forced to split off a part of our attention on our studies to follow the patterns. For most students, they won't be as efficient."
Some people argue that studying with music triggers memory. If you study while listening to a certain song, the argument goes, it should be easier to recall the information later if you can think about that song again.
In reality, the brain doesn't work that way. Learning is context sensitive. For example, experiments have shown that people are worse at remembering information when they are tested under different conditions than those they studied in. This means that if a person listens to music while studying and then later takes a test without the music, they will be less able to remember what they studied.
Listening to music while studying has both its advantages and disadvantages. As long as you make to remain focused on the work you're doing, it doesn't matter how you study. Just choose whichever way works best for you.
Edited by Michael Holtz