38_5 Listening to music while solving that Math problem
Are you a student who is listening to your favorite song while working on your math problem and get both tasks done simultaneously? Have you noted how many times you got your math problem solved correctly and how much time you spent working on that? Most students can relate to this scenario and if you are successfully completing both tasks, then you are benefiting from Divided Attention
What is Divided Attention?
Simply put, divided attention is a type of simultaneous attention that allows us to process different information sources and successfully carry out multiple tasks at a time. It is our brain’s ability to pay attention to different stimuli at the same time while attending to the external demands. It is a valuable cognitive skill helping us to be more efficient within our busy schedules. For example, a person could be talking on the phone while watching a film.
How does this happen?
The pre-frontal cortex of our brain, which is located at the frontal lobe of our brain is the component responsible for divided attention. Generally, decision taking and reasoning, logical thinking, abstract thinking are the basic mechanisms taking place at the pre-frontal cortex. When we are engaging in a certain activity, we automatically activate our pre-frontal cortex to cater our job/activity. But when we are engaging in multiple activities at the same time, this pre-frontal cortex takes it all up onto its shoulders and works more to cater all of these activities simultaneously.
Is it good? Or bad?
You might think it is very beneficial that our brain is able to complete multiple tasks at the same time, since it’s very convenient and time saving. It definitely is an advantageous aspect of our brain, even though some of the recent researches claim a bad side of divided attention. Since there is a high demand for the processing of information during divided attention, there is a high risk of having less accuracy and reduced performance speed of the activities we are engaged with. This is why sometimes
we are unable to solve the math problem for a long time or won’t be able to solve it while listening to music. Because our pre-frontal cortex is paying attention to solve the math problem, while trying to understand the lyrical meaning or appreciate the music of the song we are listening to. Research done based on this scenario has found out that there are ambiguous results on the performance while listening to music. A study in Malaysia has shown that the performance of students was not heavily impacted just by listening to music1. If we take mathematical question solving, it is a task requiring heavy cognitive performance. Another research has depicted that listening to music while engaging in a task will distract our cognitive performance2. However, the good news is that, a recent study in Indonesia has shown that listening to music while working could rather make you calm and concentrated3.
So What?
You might have got used to listen to music while doing your studies, and this might be very comforting for you. But when you reflect back, perhaps you might see that the time you spent on solving your math issue, while listening to music is higher than the time spent solving it without listening to music. Perhaps it might not be. All of these brain functions depend on our individual differences of the brain structure, genetics and environmental influence. Just like that, engaging in cognitive tasks while listening to music could be beneficial for some and not beneficial for some as well.
Navodya Weerasinghe
