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In praise of the printed book: The value of concentration in the digital age

<p>There is an old saying that anxiety is the enemy of concentration.</p> <p>One of the best pieces of sports journalism I ever read was by <a href="http://spectator.org/archives/2007/02/22/the-man-who-wasnt-there">Gene Tunney</a>, world heavyweight champion of the 1920s, writing about how reading books helped him stay calm and focused in the lead-up to his most famous fight against former champion Jack Dempsey. While members of Dempsey’s camp ridiculed Tunney for his bookishness, Tunney kept calm, and went on to win.</p> <p>Most of us would feel stressed at the prospect of stepping into the boxing ring, but stress-related illnesses, especially depression and forms of anxiety and attention disorder, are becoming increasingly prevalent, especially in wealthy societies. According to a major <a href="http://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=1&amp;ved=0CCIQFjAA&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.plosmedicine.org%2Farticle%2FfetchSingleRepresentation.action%3Furi%3Dinfo%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0030442.sd004&amp;ei=_3mgULrKOoWRigeI6IDoCw&amp;usg=AFQjCNFMmbioHNEqLYDf0H8jduBX-qV_hw">2006 projection of global mortality by Mathers and Loncar</a>, by 2030, unipolar depression will be almost 40% more likely to cause death or disability than heart disease in wealthy societies.</p> <p>Stress can of course have many causes, but in the most general sense, it spreads from factors that impact negatively on focus and concentration. We fear interruption or a surplus of tasks, responsibilities or options to choose, leading to heightened stress levels.</p> <p>The digital age is an age of distraction; and distraction causes stress and weakens concentration. Concentration, as the philosopher <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/james/">William James</a> argued in his classic 1890 work <a href="http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/"><em>Principles of Psychology</em></a>, is the most fundamental element of intellectual development. He wrote:</p> <blockquote> <p>The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again, is the very root of judgement, character, and will … An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.</p> </blockquote> <p>Concentration is equally important emotionally, as is being increasingly revealed by new research into <a href="http://www.lib.monash.edu.au/collections/monash-authors/2008/9781741667042.html">“mindfulness” and meditation</a>. The inability to focus is associated with depression and anxiety and, amongst other things, an underdeveloped sociability and human empathy. Tests have revealed that people report greater happiness from being effectively focused on what they are doing than from daydreaming on even pleasant topics.</p> <p>How many memoirs include stories of the author surreptitiously reading books by torchlight underneath the blankets, with parents fearful of the child reading too much? (In my case I was reading The Hardy Boys so my mother’s objections were probably justified.)</p> <p>As <a href="http://www.jamescarroll.net/JAMESCARROLL.NET/Welcome.html">James Carroll</a> has argued, at its core, reading is <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0130-02.htm">“the occasion of the encounter with the self”</a>. In other words, the ultimate object of reading is not to take on information but to absorb and reflect upon it and, in the process, hopefully, form a more developed version of one’s own identity or being.</p> <p>It seems likely that the concentration required and encouraged by books is extremely valuable. Reading books is good for you. And this seems especially so in the case of print books, where a reader is most completely free from distraction.</p> <p>Ebooks, and more pertinently perhaps, the digital reading environment, are unquestionably transformative in the opportunities and experiences they offer to readers. Great oceans of knowledge otherwise only obtainable through tracking down print books or physical archives and records, have become available and, much more easily searchable. <a href="http://websearch.about.com/od/h/g/hyperlink.htm">Hyperlinks</a> mean readers no longer have to read in a straight line, as it were, but can follow innumerable paths of interest.</p> <p><a href="http://www.unimelb.edu.au/copyright/information/guides/wikisblogsweb2blue.pdf">Web2 technologies</a> enable “talking back” to publishers and media, the formation of groups of readers with common interests, easy (sometimes too easy) sharing of files and other information. Stories can be enriched by animated graphics and interactivity. And so on.</p> <p>No-one in their right mind would imagine that the e-reading environment can or should somehow be wound back.</p> <p>Nonetheless, by their nature e-reading devices facilitate and encourage the constant, inevitably distracting consideration of other reading options, more or less instantly attainable. This is probably their main selling point. <a href="http://ase.tufts.edu/epcd/faculty/wolf.asp">Maryanne Wolf</a> has even asked:</p> <blockquote> <p>“if the assumption that ‘more’ and ‘faster’ are necessarily better (will) have consequences that radically affect the quality of attention that can transform a word into a thought and a thought into a world of unimagined possibility?”</p> </blockquote> <p>It is interesting to consider, in light of this possibility that the greatest benefit of reading may come from its capacity to assist in the development of focus and concentration, that the print book may not actually have been superseded or, indeed, be supersede-able.</p> <p>This, I think, is what the novelist, critic, philosopher and communications historian <a href="http://www.umbertoeco.com/en/">Umberto Eco</a> means when he argues: “The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved.”<!-- Below is The Conversation's page counter tag. Please DO NOT REMOVE. --><img style="border: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; margin: 0 !important; max-height: 1px !important; max-width: 1px !important; min-height: 1px !important; min-width: 1px !important; opacity: 0 !important; outline: none !important; padding: 0 !important; text-shadow: none !important;" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/9855/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" /><!-- End of code. If you don't see any code above, please get new code from the Advanced tab after you click the republish button. The page counter does not collect any personal data. More info: http://theconversation.com/republishing-guidelines --></p> <p><em>Written by <span>Nathan Hollier, Director, Monash University Publishing, Monash University</span>. Republished with permission of </em><a href="https://theconversation.com/in-praise-of-the-printed-book-the-value-of-concentration-in-the-digital-age-9855"><em>The Conversation</em></a><em>. </em></p>

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Does music really help you concentrate?

<p><em><strong>Nick Perham is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Cardiff Metropolitan University.</strong></em></p> <p>Many of us listen to music while we work, thinking that it will help us to concentrate on the task at hand. And in fact, recent research has found that music can have <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong><a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0182210" target="_blank">beneficial effects on creativity</a></strong></span>. When it comes to other areas of performance, however, the impact of background music is more complicated.</p> <p>The assumption that listening to music when working is beneficial to output likely has its roots in the so-called “<span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8413624" target="_blank">Mozart effect</a></strong></span>”, which gained wide media attention in the early 1990s. Put simply, this is the finding that spatial rotation performance (mentally rotating a 3D dimensional shape to determine whether it matches another or not) is increased immediately after listening to the music of Mozart, compared to relaxation instructions or no sound at all. Such was the attention that this finding garnered that the then US governor of Georgia, Zell Miller, <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1998/01/15/us/georgia-s-governor-seeks-musical-start-for-babies.html" target="_blank">proposed giving free cassettes or CDs</a></strong></span> of Mozart’s music to prospective parents.</p> <p>Subsequent studies have cast doubt on the necessity of the music of Mozart to produce this effect – a “<span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong><a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9280.00170" target="_blank">Schubert effect</a></strong></span>”, a “<span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16597767" target="_blank">Blur effect</a></strong></span>”, and even a “<span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong><a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9280.00170" target="_blank">Stephen King effect</a></strong></span>” (his audiobook rather than his singing) have all been observed. In addition, musicians could show the effect <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong><a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12144-014-9232-7" target="_blank">purely from imagining the music</a></strong></span> rather than actually listening to it.</p> <p>So researchers then suggested that the “Mozart effect” was not due to his music as such, but rather to people’s optimum levels of mood and arousal. And so it became the “<span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong><a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9280.00170" target="_blank">mood and arousal effect</a></strong></span>”.</p> <p>Unfortunately, the situations in which most mood and arousal effects are observed are slightly unrealistic. Do we really sit and listen to music, switch it off, and then engage in our work in silence? More likely is that we work with our favourite tunes playing in the background.</p> <p>How sound affects performance has been the topic of laboratory research for over 40 years, and is observed through a phenomenon called the irrelevant sound effect. Basically, this effect means that <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong><a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pchj.44/abstract" target="_blank">performance is poorer</a></strong></span> when a task is undertaken in the presence of background sound (irrelevant sound that you are ignoring), in comparison to quiet.</p> <p>To study irrelevant sound effect, participants are asked to complete a simple task which requires them to recall a series of numbers or letters in the exact order in which they saw them – similar to trying to memorise a telephone number when you have no means to write it down. In general, people achieve this by rehearsing the items either aloud or under their breath. The tricky thing is being able to do this while ignoring any background noise.</p> <p>Two key characteristics of the irrelevant sound effect are required for its observation. First, the task must require the person to use their rehearsal abilities, and second, the sound must contain acoustical variation – for example, sounds such as “n, r, p” as opposed to “c, c, c”. Where the sound does not vary much acoustically, then performance of the task is much closer to that observed in quiet conditions. Interestingly, it does not matter whether the person likes the sound or not. <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong><a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/acp.1731/abstract" target="_blank">Performance is equally as poor</a></strong></span> whether the background sound is music the person likes or dislikes.</p> <p>The irrelevant sound effect itself comes from attempting to process two sources of ordered information at the same time – one from the task and one from the sound. Unfortunately, only the former is required to successfully perform the serial recall task, and the effort expended in ensuring that irrelevant order information from the sound is not processed actually impedes this ability.</p> <p>A similar conflict is also seen when reading while in the presence of lyrical music. In this situation, the two sources of words – from the task and the sound – are in conflict. The subsequent cost is poorer performance of the task in the presence of <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong><a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/acp.2994/abstract" target="_blank">music with lyrics</a></strong></span>.</p> <p>What this all means is that whether having music playing in the background helps or hinders performance depends on the task and on the type of music, and only understanding this relationship will help people maximise their productivity levels. If the task requires creativity or some element of mental rotation then listening to music one likes can increase performance. In contrast, if the task requires one to rehearse information in order then quiet is best, or, in the case of reading comprehension, quiet or instrumental music.</p> <p>One promising area of the impact of music on cognitive abilities stems from actually learning to play a musical instrument. Studies show that children who are being musically trained show an <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong><a href="http://www.erin.utoronto.ca/~w3psygs/SchellenbergCDPS2005.pdf" target="_blank">improvement in intellectual abilities</a></strong></span>. However, the reasons behind this are, at present, unknown and likely to be complex. It may not be the music per se that produces this effect but more the activities associated with studying music, such as concentration, repeated practice, lessons and homework.</p> <p><em>Written by Nick Perham. Republished with permission of <a href="http://theconversation.com/" target="_blank"><strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">The Conversation</span></strong></a>.<img width="1" height="1" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/86952/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-advanced" alt="The Conversation"/> </em></p>

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