Should I Be Listening to Music While I Work.doc

Should I Be Listening to Music While I Work?ByJames HamblinSep 10 2012, 11:14 AM ET 20The Emporium of Medicinal Wonderments: In an ongoing series, the curious men and women of The Atlantic bombard me with their physiological curiosities.What music should I be listening to while I work?The xx has a new album thats streaming on NPR. Its pretty good. Does it mess you up if there are lyrics?Not always. Thanks for the recommendation, but I mean is there a type of music that we know makes us work more efficiently or generally better? Or should I even be listening to music? I thought Id ask because I read about how doctors listen to music in the operating room.Yeah, they do. but thats a very different kind of work, mentally, from writing. For an experienced surgeon in the OR its mostly mechanical, rote.So if youre doing something less familiar, is music distracting and counterproductive? I think about Conors piece a while back about how working in coffee shops is good because you have just the right amount of distraction.Yeah, so some studies have shown that music makes people more productive, but others have shown it has no effect or can be counterproductive. We do know that some level of ambient noise can increase creativity. I think thats a big part of the benefit, for people like you whose brains are accustomed to having a lot of things going at once. Are you familiar with listening spare time? I think about that a lot - that as we listen to people speak, our brains have the capacity to process more than just what were hearing. So you can either fill that space with daydreaming - which can potentially veer you off into complete distraction - or with some monotonous task that prevents you from daydreaming but still fills the space, leaving you more focused overall.So is music the best thing to fill that space?People were talking for a while about this thing called the Mozart Effect, where listening to Mozart showed some temporary improvement in spatial reasoning. But thats also contested - and spatial reasoning, unlike in surgery, isnt much help in writing. It depends how you work, what your environment is like, and what music youve got to choose from.I hear a lot of people advocating techno, or just generally drum/bass-centric music for work.Spencer is pretty into having this 13-minute techno song on repeat when he has to get stuff done. But even he admits that it sometimes makes him feel detached from reality. Which I think weve all noticed sometimes when you walk by his desk.Sometimes his eyes are rolled into the back of his head.Yeah.I got really reliant on working to the first act of Beethovens Fidelio, and now I cant really enjoy it in the same way because it sounds like work to me.Definitely dont ruin your favorite music by associating it with work. But it is theoretically best to listen to music you enjoy - dopamine release, creativity, efficiency, etc.Its like the equivalent of techno for me with work, though - but a nineteenth-century German opera. In any case, its interesting how we engineer these little systems and get stuck in them.Yeah. Theres validity to the idea that you should keep mixing up what you listen to, for the same reasons that you work more efficiently in a coffee shop - the unique surroundings heighten your awareness and vigilance, keeping you more productive. Like how you work better if everyone can see your computer monitor.Do I?Most do. But I think the crux of the coffee shop argument - and the music-specific one - is the ambient levels of noise. Ideally we want some, but not too much, and not the distracting kind. On a typical day around here, the ambient noise is perfect. But on Monday mornings when its too quiet, or when Jordan is doing one of his amazing 90-minute phone interviews right next to me about something that I cant not listen to - like Canadas strategic maple syrup reserve; or, exactly at this moment, he just said to someone on the phone I have disagreed with you in the past in print, but I really respect what you do, - music is definitely the more productive way to go for most of us.What about music just generally making people smarter? Like Baby Mozart?I dont want to say theres nothing to it, but still, most brilliant people today didnt have Mozart in utero or crib. I certainly wouldnt imply that parents who didnt expose their babies to incessant classical music deprived them of reaching their full intellectual capacity. What we do know, though, is that learning to play a musical instrument at a young age has all kinds of benefits. The safest investment is probably one of those little harps for your baby, like the cherubs play in paintings.Ill get right on that.工作的时候，我该听音乐么？最近，大西洋月刊的男男女女们，用他们各种生理好奇心对我狂轰滥炸。 我工作的时候，应该听什么歌呢？ NPR上最近一直在播那谁谁的新专辑，很不错。如果歌曲有歌词的话，不会干扰你么？ 并非总是如此。谢谢你的推荐，但是我的意思是，有没有一种音乐，听了能让我们提高工作效率，总体更好呢？ 还是我根本就不该听音乐？我觉得我应该问问，因为我读到一些文章，说医生在手术室里还听音乐呢。 嗯，是的，他们确实听音乐但是心理上来看，那是一种和写作完全不同的工作。对于手术室里一个经验丰富的医生而言，大部分都是机械操作，固定程序。 所以如果你在做某项不太熟悉的工作时，音乐是不是会让你分心、适得其反呢？我想到了不久之前康纳（Conor）的那篇文章，说在咖啡店里工作很好，因为在那可以有适量的分神。 是的，有些研究显示，音乐能让人们更有效率，但是也有研究表明音乐对人的工作效率并无影响，或者甚至会起反作用。我们确定的是，某种程度的环境杂声可以提高创造力。我觉得这是一个很大的益处，因为像你们这种人，大脑已经习惯同时思考很多事情。你们对“在业余时间听音乐”这种说法熟悉么？关于这点，我想了很多我们在听别人讲话的时候，除了消化正在听到的内容外，我们的大脑还有更多的容量可做其他事情。所以，要么你就用白日做梦来填补那段空间这有可能将你引向完全的神游要么就做一些单调的工作，可以防止你白日做梦，但是也能填补那段空间，让你的精神总体上更加集中。 那么音乐是填补那段空间最好的东西么？ 人们一直在谈“莫扎特效应”，即听莫扎特的音乐，在空间推理上会表现出暂时的提高。但是关于这点也有争论空间推理，不像外科手术，对写作没什么帮助。这取决于你的工作方式，工作环境，还有你要选择的音乐。 我听很多人提倡，在工作时听铁克诺音乐（Techno，又译“高科技舞曲”，是一种电子音乐译注。），或者仅仅就是总体上以鼓声/低音为主的音乐。 斯宾塞（Spencer）很喜欢在必须要完成某项工作的时候，单曲循环这首长达13分钟的铁克诺歌曲。但是就连他也承认，有时候这种音乐会让他脱离现实。这点，我想有时走过他桌子的时候，我们都有注意到。 我在工作的时候真的很依赖贝多芬“费德里奥”的第一节，现在我都不能用同样的方式真正欣赏它了，因为对我而言，那听起来像工作。 绝对不要因为将你最爱的音乐和工