From Mozart to Metallica, tons of people enjoy listening to various types of music while they paint, write, or draw. Many believe that music helps to boost creativity, but an international study conducted by English and Swedish researchers is challenging that notion. Psychologists from Lancaster University, the University of Gavle, and the University of Central Lancashire say that their findings indicate music actually stops creativity.
To come to their conclusions, researchers made participants complete verbal(语言的) insight problems designed to inspire their creativity while in a quiet room and then again while music played in the background. They found that background music "damaged" the participants' ability to complete tasks associated with verbal creativity.
The research team also tested background noises such as those often heard in a library, but found that such noises had no impact on subjects' creativity. The tasks were simple word games. For example, participants were given three words, such as dress, dial, and flower. Then, they were asked to find a single word associated with all three that could be combined to form a common phrase or word. The single word, in this case, would be "sun" (sundress, sunflower, ete). Participants completed the tasks in either a quiet room, or while exposed to three different types of music: music with unfamiliar lyrics, instrumental music or music with familiar lyrics.
They found strong evidence of damaging performance when playing background music in comparison to quiet background conditions. Also, as far as the library background noises having seemingly no effect, the study's authors believe that was the case because library noises create a "steady state" environment that doesn't disrupt concentration.
It's worth mentioning that even familiar music with well-known lyrics would damage participants' creativity, regardless of whether or not it inspired a positive reaction, or whether participants typically studied or created while listening to music.
