This is absolutely true. I’m a little shocked at how many programmers and other ‘mind-workers’ (students are especially bad at this) think that putting on some music is helpful, or neutral. It’s neither; even classical music or chants hurt.
Music seems to work sometimes with getting started on things. Maybe it does narrow the cognitive space, but this is actually a good thing as long as the mind isn’t really occupied with the actual work and is instead full of random, distracting thoughts. So maybe there should be a music player mode which starts normally, but then slowly fades out during the next ten minutes or so?
Music can also alter mood, which could likewise be useful for getting started on working.
(I have no studies handy for this, but I’ve tried music with Mnemosyne, Gbrainy, and Dual N-back, and in all 3 and all the sessions, my statistical performance was hurt to a greater or less extent.)
One thing I’d be interested in knowing is whether the familiarity of the music matters. I wouldn’t be surprised if completely novel music caused a larger cognitive load than familiar music. What about if you’ve heard the piece of music once, ten times or a hundred times?
Also, what effect does the type of the music have? Lyrics probably make a difference. What about music that doesn’t even have many recognizable melodies, such as ambient or trance? What about white noise?
The Unpleasant Truth Party Game
I wanted to make this idea a new post, but apparently I need karma for that. So I’ll just put it here:
The aim is to come up with sentences that are informative, true and maximally offensive. Each of the participants comes up with a sentence. The other participants rate the sentence for two values, how offensive it is on a scale from 0 (perfectly inoffensive) to 1 (the most unspeakable thing imaginable), and how informative it is from 0 (complete gibberish or an utterly obvious untruth) to 1 (immensely precise and true beyond question). As with any real-world probabilities, exact 0 and 1 should probably be avoided, but anything arbitrarily close to them is fair.
Each sentence is scored by it’s offensiveness score Q and its truthfulness score P. The total score of the sentence is P * Q. This will give a higher score the more the statement is both true and offensive.
Coming up with absolute probabilities and calculating the score formula might be a bit hard for a tabletop game. A variation could have the players just ordering the sentences on offensiveness and truthfulness tracks, assign 1 to the top item each, 2 to the next and so on, multiply the two values for each sentence. In this variant, the lowest score wins.
In the ordering game, getting a good position on either track should beat an average position, 4 2 = 8 < 3 3 = 9.
Could this be made into an actually playable game? How many sessions could you play and still have a social circle?