Here's Why Listening To Music Doesn't Actually Enhance Creativity

Music has long been believed to promote creativity. But a new study suggested that listening to tunes while working isn't actually as helpful as people thought.

According to a paper published in Applied Cognitive Psychology, researchers from the University of Central Lancashire, University of Gävle in Sweden and Lancaster University found that listening to music actually "significantly impaired" rather than boosted people's capacity to finish tasks involving verbal creativity. In contrast, background library noise proved to have no effect when put to the same test.

For the study, the psychologists who authored the paper tested people on three different verbal insight problems that require creativity in various scenarios. The subjects were either tested with no music playing or while exposed to background music with foreign (unfamiliar lyrics), instrumental music without lyrics or music with familiar lyrics.

One test included giving each subject a set of three words (e.g. dress, dial, flower) and asking them to find a single associated word (in this case, "sun") that could be combined to make a common word or phrase (i.e., sundress, sundial and sunflower).

"We found strong evidence of impaired performance when playing background music in comparison to quiet background conditions," Dr. Neil McLatchie of Lancaster University said in a statement.

Music may disrupt verbal working memory, the study suggested. Listening to music with familiar lyrics also had negative effects on the participants' creativity, regardless of whether or not the songs boosted their mood and were liked by the subjects.

Background library noise, however, seemed to have the same effects on the participants as a quiet environment. It is not as disruptive as actual music as it is considered to be a "steady state" environment, according to the researchers.

"To conclude, the findings here challenge the popular view that music enhances creativity and instead demonstrate that music, regardless of the presence of semantic content (no lyrics, familiar lyrics or unfamiliar lyrics), consistently disrupts creative performance in insight problem solving," McLatchie said.

But while music may not help in tasks requiring creativity, a previous study showed that it does have a positive effect on language skills.

According to the research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last year, musical training is at least as beneficial in improving the language skills of children as extra reading lessons. The study, performed in Beijing, focused primarily on piano lessons' effects on kindergartners.

Playing the piano did not show significant effects on the students' overall cognitive ability, but "they did show some improvements in word discrimination, particularly for consonants," according to Robert Desimone, director of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the senior author of the paper.