 Does listening to music while studying improve your exam grades? Will listening to Mozart make you a genius? Should you study in silence or with lo-fi hip hop in the background? It seems like there are so many conflicting opinions about what music is best to listen to when studying, but should you even listen to music? And if you do, then what music should you listen to? What is up guys? KarmaMedic here and welcome back to another dose. One of the most common questions I get from my viewers on my long study with me videos is if I listen to music when I'm studying, what music I listen to and if I think it helps me be more productive. I'm always asked this in my Q&A videos and there's even an entire channel on my Patreon Discord server dedicated to chatting about music. Subscribe down below. It seems like everyone, just like me, is looking to find the connection between music and studying. So I did a whole bunch of research and here's what I found. Let's start with one of the things that always comes up when talking about music and studying. The supposed fact that listening to Mozart makes you more intelligent. This is also called the Mozart effect. I found out that this conversation started in 1993 when a psychologist called Francis Rauscher, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, played 10 minutes of Mozart to 36 college students and then immediately followed up that music with a test. The students were also tested in the same way after listening to 10 minutes of someone speaking or after a period of 10 minutes of silence. Once they tested the students with a spatial reasoning test, they found that those who listened to Mozart scored significantly higher on the spatial temporal task. So does this mean that listening to Mozart makes you smarter? Well, no. We can't draw any conclusions about general intelligence and the effect seen from the study were small gains and they didn't last very long. But what the research did find is that listening to Mozart improved spatial reasoning for about 10 minutes. As you can imagine, the findings from this study absolutely blew up. It was everywhere on the news and this even led to expectant mothers playing Mozart for their babies inside the womb. Francis Rauscher even said that they found an entire aisle of Mozart's music in virgin records with quotes from the paper on the adverts. This thing was big and people believed it. It turns out that the study was misinterpreted by the media quite a bit and people falsely believe that you would essentially become smarter just by listening to Mozart. The reality is that this is almost definitely not true and we can pretty much call this one a myth right off the bat. But it did get me thinking, are there optimal types of music that we can listen to when we study or should we just be studying in silence? So the research seems to suggest that studying in silence is a preference and that this might be a good thing to do for tasks that require a particularly high level of focus. But I want to make the argument that music can actually be beneficial if it's something you feel like will work for you during a particular type of study session or something that you just find enjoyable and has worked for you in the past. If you're doing regular revision or going over content, then music can actually help reduce stress at times when the pressure is high. A meta analysis of 51 studies found that music can help to release biochemical stress reducing effects. If you're doing repetitive tasks like organizing your files or creating a revision timetable or anything that doesn't really require that much laser focus, then music can give you a boost of energy to keep you going. You can get a productivity boost from music when you're doing less demanding tasks, especially if you choose songs with no lyrics or something that's less likely to stimulate you outside of what it is that you're focusing on. This could be a song you already know or something that you don't immediately want to get up and dance to. When it comes to cognitively demanding tasks, it's not always the right call to sit in silence and work. This can be a good strategy if you're trying to really focus and you know that you're the type of person that gets easily distracted by music, especially when you're doing a task that becomes intense. On the other hand, if studying in silence sounds awful to you or you can only study when there's music playing, then maybe choosing something that's without lyrics or something that's a bit more repetitive can be the good choice. Lyrics can be really distracting, especially if you're reading words for your studying. It might not be as distracting if you're doing something like solving math equations or physics equations or something like that, but definitely at least personally, if I'm trying to read words and I'm listening to music that has words, then I find it very, very distracting. Soft classical music has shown some promise for demanding tasks in some studies, but I think it really depends on what you like and what works for you personally. This is the key with all of this research. The only way of knowing if these studies will actually be beneficial to you is if you tailor the information that you're getting from them to yourself. If you hate classical music or you hate Mozart, then just don't listen to it. No amount of research is going to make that more beneficial for you, and it's just not going to be as good as listening to something that you like. You're not going to get some version of that famous Mozart effect if you just hate Mozart. If you love listening to Drake, then listen to Drake. If you love listening to Ariana Grande, then listen to Ariana Grande. You might just want to change the songs that you're listening to or the genre of music that you're listening to based on what kind of activity you're doing. Another nice tip is to listen to a song or two before you start work that gets you pumped up for the study session. Make a playlist of all the songs that get you really motivated and throw that on before starting your work. Some studies have shown that music can even improve cognitive performance when it comes to doing creative tasks. The point is that you need to be self-aware enough about what works for you. If music is incredibly distracting to you and you find yourself getting nothing done, then you probably want to stay away from it and keep your high-focused tasks for silent studying or playing something like white noise or brown noise or instrumental music in the background. Whether music actually helps you study is entirely down to the task that you're doing and what music you like and how you work with music. From my personal experience as a brief overview, this is what I would recommend. If you need to be in extreme concentration like you're trying to understand a very complex concept or you're doing research for an essay and it involves a lot of thinking, then for me personally, I just prefer to be in silence or with a pair of noise-canceling headphones over my ears. If you've got a high concentration task like maybe you're reviewing your notes or you're studying for an upcoming exam, you're going through difficult past paper questions, then for me, I like listening to repetitive music without lyrics or lo-fi beats, rainforest sounds, fireplace crackling, or rain, things like that. Once I enter the medium concentration category like reading over lecture slides or going over flashcards, doing past paper questions really quickly, then this is where I feel comfortable listening to music that has lyrics in it. I go somewhere in between. Nothing too crazy, full of rap lyrics and hype, but nothing that's too simple either. And then for low concentration tasks, things like writing emails or organizing things in my room, cleaning up, cooking, showering, whatever, I just throw on Spotify on shuffle and listen to anything that's engaging and stimulating to my brain. I've mentioned that you need to tailor the evidence from the studies to yourself and your personality. And what I mean by this is that if the alternative is to not study at all or do very little studying because the silence is boring to you, then just put music on. It's a no brainer. If you're making a choice between studying at 75% of your maximum efficiency with music or not studying at all, then just choose to study with music at 75%. Getting something done is always going to be better than nothing, especially if the work is piling up. I want to go over a couple of points that I've discovered over my many, many years of studying, which have seemed to help me quite a bit. One, matching the task to the tempo of the music. Sometimes if you're working to a close deadline, it's nice to have a slightly more upbeat music selection in the background so that it feels like the music and yourself are moving at a similar speed. This can be motivating. And as long as the music isn't too distracting, I find that it helps encourage me to stick to the pace that I need to do to reach my deadline. Two, I personally find lo-fi beats or rainforest sounds, fireplace, crackling or rain, anything like that. I find it very, very useful when I'm not in the mood to study. I find that it really helps put me in the zone and increases my productivity and focus. I think the reason for that is that they're quite repetitive sounds and they don't involve any lyrics, they don't involve any words, and so it's just kind of there in the background and helps me focus. But I prefer it to things like white noise or brown noise because that's just like... doesn't work for me. But if it works for you, go for it. And number three is getting your playlists organized. There's nothing worse than trying to study or trying to get into the zone and every couple of minutes having to skip a bunch of songs because you just don't want to listen to them or you hate them. It's the worst. It's also really, really distracting. Especially if you have to use your phone to change that music, then it's really tempting to have a quick look on Instagram or YouTube and you know, before you know it, you've been distracted for 20 minutes. So get your playlist organized and if you have any playlists that you'd like to recommend, please do share them in the comments down below. It turns out that the answer to the question of what you should be listening to when studying is a bit more complicated than I thought, but I'm glad that what already works for me seems to match up with the evidence. If music is not too distracting to you, then tailor the music to the task that you're doing. And if not, ask yourself if working in silence is better for you instead. There's nothing wrong with either ways of studying. You've just got to do what works for you. We've all probably found specific ways of studying that work for us better through trial and error, but I hope this video can help some of you fine tune your studying sessions to make them as productive as possible. And hopefully after this, no one will ask me again if I'm listening to music or not when studying and what I'm listening to. I'll catch you guys in the next one. Check out my Patreon in the description down below. If you haven't already, we do some pretty cool stuff over there. Peace.