Music may impair creativity
2019-02-28 22:27:51.92167+01 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
Listening to music may be damaging your creativity
The team discovered that creative performance dropped significantly when listening to music over the course of all three exercises, as compared to periods during which participants were allowed to complete the exercises without distraction. Even when participants declared that the music improved their overall mood, in the third exercise, it still impaired creativity.
Summary Background music has been claimed to enhance people's creativity. In three experi-ments, we investigated the impact of background music on performance of Com-pound Remote Associate Tasks (CRATs), which are widely thought to tap creativity.Background music with foreign (unfamiliar) lyrics (Experiment 1), instrumental musicwithout lyrics (Experiment 2), and music with familiar lyrics (Experiment 3) all signifi-cantly impaired CRAT performance in comparison with quiet background conditions.Furthermore, Experiment 3 demonstrated that background music impaired CRAT per-formance regardless of whether the music induced a positive mood or whether partic-ipants typically studied in the presence of music. The findings challenge the view thatbackground music enhances creativity and are discussed in terms of an auditory dis-traction account (interference‐by‐process) and the processing disfluency account.