By Odessa Grove
Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, and iHeartRadio are all amazing apps created to provide people, from anywhere, music at any time. Music provides everyone with a sense of feeling all different kinds of moods and can be listened to for whatever occasion. Some people want to dance around their kitchen, while others just want to scream a breakup song in the privacy of their cars. Finally, what my friend and I like to do is carpool to karaoke. However, some people find themselves listening to music while they are studying. I know I am no saint when it comes to watching YouTube videos or streaming Hulu while I am studying for tests or writing a paper. I mean, it is impossible not to when my phone is right there. However, whatever I might be listening to while studying or writing a paper, I often find myself being very distracted and end up procrastinating on my assignment. I always stress about my grade, so I know I should focus on the task in hand. However, I always get stuck on what is happening on social media right now, or, depending on the song, I will just start to sing my heart out and not even care about my assignment anymore. Why, why is this a difficult task to do? Well, the answer is the result of divided attention, or more well-known name, multitasking.
Divided Attention, what even is that?
Whether or not we can multitask, or divide our attention, is still a mystery that is often debated within the world of psychology. However, many psychologists have supported the idea that dividing our attention can lead to dangerous results. In a study done by a group of psychologists, they proposed ideas that divided attention decreased our thinking ability (1). So, what is divided attention, you might be asking. Well, the simple term for it is when we focus on more than one thing at a time. A good example of this is walking and chewing gum at the same time. We need to focus on making sure we do not trip on our way to class, but we still need to make sure that we do not choke on that piece of gum we are chewing on in our mouth.
Psychologists often describe divided attention as both a miracle that with practice we can do, but also a curse because we, as humans, assume we are always good at multitasking. This then leaves too many mistakes, especially ones that are costly. Now, if we practice, then we can be really good at dividing our attention into two different tasks. However, the important thing to remember is that our brains are still not adequate enough to attend to two different things. Take, for example, being on your phone and driving. According to the national highway traffic safety administration, distracted driving will take 3,522 lives in 2021 (2). An extreme example of divided attention, however this example shows what can happen with divided attention. This is the reason why divided attention is not something that we are able to accomplish, especially in very selective attention problems. What is selective attention, well selective attention is just attending to one thing or item at a time. Think about Broadant and Teriseamm’s attention model ‘bottleneck’. This model shows and promotes the idea that we can only focus on one stimulus at a time (3). For example, when you have a bottleneck and need to put things in the bottle, you have to put things in one at a time. Otherwise, you will just cram things into the bottle. Similarly, we need to make sure that we are not focusing on more than one thing at a time.
What Does That Have To Do With Music?
Well, due to the brain not being able to adequately handle two things at a time, we should not be listening to audio and writing and/or reading at the same time. Many studies suggest the problem of background music, or sound, when studying or writing a paper. For example, one study that focuses on brain activity when we are both using selective attention and when we use divided attention found that the brain does double the work when it is exposed to both visual and auditory stimuli (4). This is due to the fact that divided attention is asking too much from our brain. Another study done shows that fifteen minutes of a student’s study is spent roughly six minutes studying when they are in reach and/or have access to their phone (5).
So, in conclusion…
Studying and/or writing a paper is very much something that should only have our selective attention. We as students should only focus on our assignment and only our assignment. By adding lots of stimuli to the equation, we often lose information that is very vital to studying or students will also on occasion make a mistake by writing their lyrics out on their paper instead of providing what information that is needed for their paper. By giving yourself a quiet, calm environment and limiting the background noise, this allows for better studying habits that can help aid your GPA out in college or university.
References:
- Xu, S., Wang Z., & Woods K. (2019). Multitasking and Dual Motivational Systems: A Dynamic Longitudinal Study. Human Communication Research, 45(4), https://doi.org/10.1093/hcr/hqz009.
- Rosen, L.D., Mark Carrier, L., & Cheever, N. A. (2013). Facebook and Texting Made Me do it: Media-inducted Task-Switching While Studying. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(3), 948-958). doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2012.12.001.
- Stewart, T. (2023). Overview of Motor Vehicle Traffic Crashes in 2021. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813435.
- Mcleod, S. (2023). Theories of Selective Attention. SimplyPsychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/attention-models.html.
- Salo, E., Salmela, V., Salmi, J., Numminen, J., & Alho, K. (2017). Brain Activity Associated with Selective Attention, Divided Attention and Distraction. Brain Research. 1664, 25-36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2017.03.021