Dr. Howard Smith Oncall

Vidcast:  https://youtu.be/n287C8md9t0   It’s generally thought that background music stirs creativity.  Not so says a study from several universities in the UK and Sweden just published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology.   A total of 84 university students and staff were presented with tests of creative ability, so-called Compound Remote Associate Tasks or CRAT for short.  Subjects were exposed to instrumental music only, songs with completely unfamiliar foreign language lyrics, or hit songs with familiar lyrics.  The control sounds were library background buzz and absolute quiet.   The study results showed that the familiar songs with lyrics negatively impacted creativity the most followed by instrumentals and then foreign language songs.  Test performances were the same in absolute silence and in the low din of the library.   The researchers hypothesize that the changing state of sound is most responsible for reducing creativity as the music reduces the performance of verbal working memory.  I pe