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2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44
Music has a huge impact on our condition. It helps to relax, cheers up, sets the pace for our runs, sets us in a romantic mood and helps to work. What is important for the work spirit? Concentration, attention, flow are all associated with productivity. And in order to achieve the desired state of flow, you need to keep all your attention at work long enough. And talking about it is much easier than reaching such a state.
And science has its own "musical solution" for this case.
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And now a little theory.
Why Music Helps Us Work Scientifically
Our senses receive a constant stream from the world around us - smells, light, sounds, tactile sensations. The chirping of birds outside the window, the sensation of clothes on the body and the touch of hands on the keyboard, the smell of coffee and thousands of other little things - all this fights for our attention, and as soon as you focus on one of these sensations, you are immediately distracted. It is impossible to work in such a state, and here what psychologists call “selective attention” comes to our aid, that is, when we focus on performing one, specific action, completely (but more often partially) ignoring everything that does not concern the work process.
Selective attention
Selective attention acts as a spotlight that is aimed at something, and, like any spotlight, the spot of light can be wide or narrow. For example, right now you are reading this article and your spotlight is focused on it and, most likely, the light spot is quite narrow and everything else fades into the background. But as soon as something happens that can pull your attention, you immediately refocus on the new stimulus.
And all these distractions and temptations of the modern digital world are so great that it becomes more and more difficult to work. Therefore, now one of the most important and exciting questions: "How to make it so that to be in a state of flow as long as possible, without falling out of it?"
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What do scientists say about this?
Millions of years of evolution have given humans brains that are well adapted to living in small, social, roving groups. Our eyes are able to discern the smallest details of the world around us, and our ears distinguish sounds in the sound range from 20 to 20,000 Hz.
We were specially designed by nature to hunt, look out for small fruits on a tree or in the grass, and notice in advance the approach of danger. Now the need for hunting and rescuing from predators has already disappeared, but our sensors still work according to the same system. The information received is converted into the electrochemical language of our nervous system by the system of sensory cells. For example, when you listen to music, sound waves hit your eardrum and travel to the cochlea of your inner ear, where it travels to microscopic hair cells that vibrate. And it is their movement that converts the mechanical energy of the wave into chemical signals, which then travel along the nerves - this is how you can very briefly talk about how we hear. There is a whole separate science - psychoacoustics, which studies the perception of sounds and is mainly focused on music.
And it would seem that since the sound signals distract us, then we need to work in silence. But most people do a much better job in a café filled with buzzing voices mixed with unobtrusive music playing than in a library filled with silence.
Some theorists say that this is due to the so-called cognitive overload, when our brains simply turn off the response to external stimuli. The process of getting used to the noise and switching it to the background section takes about 20 minutes. After that, you are no longer distracted and are able to concentrate on work. It's like trying to figure out what one person is saying at a noisy party.
Musical trick
The trick is to keep your brain busy enough to let it work. And music helps a lot in this. Of course, not every music works this way, as each melody has its own key and can bring up emotional images in your memory that are not quite suitable for work. Therefore, for this, it is best to choose music that does not evoke any particular negative or positive emotions. She must be neutral.
Soothing music with 60 beats per minute can reduce neural activity and lead to a calm but active state - an alpha state, which results in increased alpha activity and decreased beta activity in brain waves. This causes you to calm down and enter a flow state
A person is able to stay in such a stream for 20 to 40 minutes. But if you know your daily rhythms and superimpose them on your work schedule, the flow state can be extended up to 1-2 hours!