Tag: music

Let me introduce you to this guy

Yes. That’s the great John Von Neumann , one of the brightest minds of all time. He made huge contributions to human knowledge, from Mathematics to Physics to Computer Science to Economics to a plethora of other topics.

Von Neumann was an interesting character both, personally and scientifically. While working at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton he used to play loud classical music in order to concentrate and keep focus, much to the annoyance of his colleagues which included Einstein and Gödel. Also, he once got mad at his wife for preparing a quiet study for him to work in, preferring to work in the living room with the TV on high volume.

But why are there people who only seem to concentrate in a loud or chaotic ambient? Regarding the wiring of the brain this might have to do with our Attention Mechanisms .

Human beings have two layers of attention, one conscious and one unconscious. The conscious one enables us to direct our focus towards things we know we want to concentrate on. The unconscious one shifts our attention towards anything our senses pick up that might be significant in the surroundings.

The unconscious one is simpler, more fundamental, and linked to emotional processing rather than higher reasoning. It also operates faster and it’s constantly on. This means that when you try to consciously concentrate on a task, part of your brain is still picking up signals in the background environment that interfere with your focus. If said task is boring or unattractive to you then this interference is even stronger and you won’t need much external distraction to lose concentration. You then enter a vicious cycle of trying to force your conscious attention system to stay focused, generating fatigue and raising the probability of getting distracted even more.

This is where listening to music plays a significant role, by feeding your unconscious attention mechanism with something constant, consistent and coherent to focus in. The more you like the music, the more you will focus – obviously if you don’t like the music it will only add up to the dullness of the active attention task…but who listens to music one doesn’t like anyway?

Everyone is different and there are people that can better control their unconscious attention mechanism, or rather they don’t have it as on as others might. This doesn’t mean you have a problem or that one type is better than the other, it’s just who you are. Make the best of it.

References:

[1] John von Neumann

[2] Does music really help you concentrate?