New research from Northeastern music professor Psyche Loui and Brain.fm pinpoints the musical characteristics that can help concentration, especially for individuals who might benefit most.
If you habitually pop in AirPods when you really, really need to get some work done in your open-concept office, you’re far from alone. Nearly 80% of adults listen to music while they work, and playlists purported to improve focus have become a routine finding on Spotify and Apple Music.
“Students are always wearing headphones, right? They always have some background music on,” says Psyche Loui, an associate professor of music and head of the Music, Imaging, and Neural Dynamics (MIND) Laboratory at Northeastern University, which studies how music interacts with the brain. “A lot of folks swear by it. But others say they cannot have any music on at all when they need to concentrate.”
New research from Loui in collaboration with Brain.fm, a startup that produces music built for concentration, gets at the heart of this contradiction by singling out and testing specific musical characteristics meant to stimulate the areas of the brain that help us stay on task. Not only do they work, the researchers found, but they work especially well for people with attentional difficulties, including ADHD.
Additionally, it supports the notion that music can be an effective scientific tool for neuroscience research. “My research goal is to find out not just how music can be helpful for the brain, but also how we can use music as a way to better understand how the brain works,” Loui says. In a paper released in the Nature journal Communication Biology, Loui and her collaborators ran a series of studies measuring the effectiveness of “rapid modulations” in a piece of Brain.fm music — more quickly adjusting acoustic signals to make the “louds louder and the quiets quieter,” Loui explains.
For the study, researchers took EEG readings and MRI scans of about 40 test subjects who listened to a Brain.fm composition while completing computer tasks requiring sustained attention (to compare, participants also completed the tasks listening to non-Brain.fm music, pink noise and in silence).
During those readings, rapid modulations in the Brain.fm music — a driving, electronic instrumental piece with heavy bass and climbing synthesizer scales — “elicited greater activity in attentional networks,” the study reads.
From there, the researchers were curious if more intense rapid modulation could have greater benefits for people who exhibited attentional difficulties during the previous testing. So they adjusted the rate and depth — and found that more intense rapid modulation helped that group even more.
Why does it work? Loui says it has to do with the brain’s natural rhythmic activity.
“The brain actually oscillates at certain frequencies,” she notes. “If you insert those frequencies into the music, that might influence your activity in those same frequencies in the brain — we saw that the brain was very clearly ‘phase locking,’ or [working] in time to these amplitude modulations that were inserted in the music.“People who experience ADHD symptoms are more sensitive to this,” she adds.
But anyone whose attention might wander from time to time — so, all of us — could benefit.
“Even folks who have never been formally diagnosed with ADHD can experience symptoms like inattention or hyperactivity, difficulty getting things done,” she says. “That’s not necessarily an unhealthy thing, but when you’re specifically trying to get work done, background music or some other stimulation that can help you focus a little bit longer would be a great thing to have.”
The findings bolster Loui’s previous research suggesting that music — specifically music tailor-made for a targeted purpose — can have tangible cognitive benefits.
“Music is a form of brain stimulation,” Loui says. “Brain.fm is really unique, but there are other groups trying to engineer music from the ground up to help cognitive function, or to help with other things. Maybe you want to use it to work out. Maybe you want to use it to sleep better. We need some more science to figure that out.”
In the meantime, she thinks, the study offers some helpful takeaways for people looking to choose music to help them focus, even beyond Brain.fm’s library.
“Find fast music that energizes and excites you without being distracting,” she advises. “And no lyrics.”