So is it helpful or harmful to listen to music in the workplace?
Today, during the morning talk with a colleague about work productivity and “ ways to enter the stream, ” I was told about the topic on rsdn.ru. There, in one of the comments, it tells about the university experiment, which explains when it is useful and when it is harmful to listen to music in the workplace. Everything seems to be so clear, and everyone has long guessed about it, but to have another scientific rationale for their guesses would not hurt anyone:
“In response to complaints from employees about noise, you can try to cure the symptoms or eliminate the cause. Eliminating the cause will require creating barriers from noise — walls and doors — and will cost money. To treat a symptom is much cheaper. By setting "Muzak" or another source of pink noise, you drown out a little blood disturbing noise. You can save even more - just ignore the problem; people will then have to resort to using tape recorders and headphones to protect themselves from noise. Choosing one of these approaches, you must be ready to incur an invisible punishment - the creative abilities of your employees will suffer.
In the sixties, Cornell University researchers conducted a series of tests that determined the effect of music on a working person. They interviewed a group of computer science students and divided them into two subgroups. The first included those who liked background music in the process of working or studying, the second - those who were disturbed by music. Then half of the participants in each of the subgroups were placed in a quiet audience, and the second half - in an audience equipped with headphones with the ability to choose music. Participants in both classrooms received a Fortran programming task. No one was surprised that the participants of both audiences coped with the task equally quickly and efficiently. As any child who performs homework in mathematics to music knows, music does not affect the part of the brain that is responsible for mathematical activities; another brain center is listening to it.
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However, in the Cornell experiment there was still a hidden factor. In the formulation of the problem it was required that the output data stream be formed through a series of transformations over numbers from the input data stream. So, the participants were asked to shift each number two digits to the left, then divide it by one hundred, and so on, about ten operations. And although the specification did not say this explicitly, the final result of all transformations over the number turned out to be the number itself. Some participants understood this, and some did not. The overwhelming majority of those who guessed worked in a quiet audience.
Many of the daily tasks performed by professional workers are counted in the sequential processing center of the left hemisphere. Music does not interfere with such work, because its perception is engaged in the right holistic hemisphere of the brain. But not all tasks can be performed in the left hemisphere. There are also moments of enlightenment when you exclaim “Aha!”, Finding a short way to save many months or even years of work. Such creative insight requires the work of the right hemisphere. If the right hemisphere is busy listening to the piano concerto, the possibility of creative insight disappears.
The creative penalty imposed by the environment is cunning. Since creative abilities are already manifested irregularly, we often do not notice that they began to appear less frequently. Creative thinking of a person is not normalized. The suppression of creative thinking accumulates over time. The organization becomes less efficient, people without inspiration grind results, and the best employees leave the company. ”
If someone did not notice, here is another link to the original topic: rsdn.ru/forum/job/3915717.aspx
“In response to complaints from employees about noise, you can try to cure the symptoms or eliminate the cause. Eliminating the cause will require creating barriers from noise — walls and doors — and will cost money. To treat a symptom is much cheaper. By setting "Muzak" or another source of pink noise, you drown out a little blood disturbing noise. You can save even more - just ignore the problem; people will then have to resort to using tape recorders and headphones to protect themselves from noise. Choosing one of these approaches, you must be ready to incur an invisible punishment - the creative abilities of your employees will suffer.
In the sixties, Cornell University researchers conducted a series of tests that determined the effect of music on a working person. They interviewed a group of computer science students and divided them into two subgroups. The first included those who liked background music in the process of working or studying, the second - those who were disturbed by music. Then half of the participants in each of the subgroups were placed in a quiet audience, and the second half - in an audience equipped with headphones with the ability to choose music. Participants in both classrooms received a Fortran programming task. No one was surprised that the participants of both audiences coped with the task equally quickly and efficiently. As any child who performs homework in mathematics to music knows, music does not affect the part of the brain that is responsible for mathematical activities; another brain center is listening to it.
')
However, in the Cornell experiment there was still a hidden factor. In the formulation of the problem it was required that the output data stream be formed through a series of transformations over numbers from the input data stream. So, the participants were asked to shift each number two digits to the left, then divide it by one hundred, and so on, about ten operations. And although the specification did not say this explicitly, the final result of all transformations over the number turned out to be the number itself. Some participants understood this, and some did not. The overwhelming majority of those who guessed worked in a quiet audience.
Many of the daily tasks performed by professional workers are counted in the sequential processing center of the left hemisphere. Music does not interfere with such work, because its perception is engaged in the right holistic hemisphere of the brain. But not all tasks can be performed in the left hemisphere. There are also moments of enlightenment when you exclaim “Aha!”, Finding a short way to save many months or even years of work. Such creative insight requires the work of the right hemisphere. If the right hemisphere is busy listening to the piano concerto, the possibility of creative insight disappears.
The creative penalty imposed by the environment is cunning. Since creative abilities are already manifested irregularly, we often do not notice that they began to appear less frequently. Creative thinking of a person is not normalized. The suppression of creative thinking accumulates over time. The organization becomes less efficient, people without inspiration grind results, and the best employees leave the company. ”
If someone did not notice, here is another link to the original topic: rsdn.ru/forum/job/3915717.aspx
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/104638/
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