Both teachers in the classroom and parents at home have been faced with a teen who claims they can focus better when they have headphones or earbuds delivering music into their ears while they do school work. Experts from the Department of Psychological and Brain Science at Texas A&M University weighed in on this question:
- “Multitasking is a fallacy; human beings are not capable of truly multitasking because attention is a limited resource, and you can only focus on so much without a cost,” cognitive psychologist Brian Anderson said. “So when you’re doing two things at the same time, like studying and listening to music, and one of the things requires cognitive effort, there will be a cost to how much information you can retain doing both activities.”
- “In general, words are distracting,” Steven Smith, cognitive neuroscientist, shared. “So if you want to listen to music while you study, try to listen to something that does not have words, or if it does have words, hopefully, it’ll be in a language that you don’t understand at all, otherwise that’s going to distract from the stuff you’re trying to study.”