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How Music Affects College Students

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Is there something that a majority of students are doing that may actually be harming their attempts to study? In our experiment we found that by listening to music while studying students are hampering their ability to recall the information they are reading. We looked at how much of an impact listening to preferred and non-preferred music has on recall ability in college students compared to no music playing. We used two different tests to check recall of words and reading comprehension. We found that reading comprehension is reduced by listening to music and listening to non-preferred music reduces this capacity even more If students had a simple way to improve our grades and quiz scores it may well be worth knowing before the next exam. …show more content…

For instance music can bring back long forgotten memories, or give an athlete the drive to push harder while training in the gym. Brattico and Pearce show that the reason for this lies in the neurological effects that music has on the human mind (2013). The reason for these affects is the way that music affects different parts of the brain like the amygdala, and the auditory cortex (Brattico). By affecting theses parts of the brain music has been shown to have an influence previously thought to only known to be associated with visual stimuli (Brattico). According to Saarkillio, Vuoskoski, and Luck there is even an element of communication in music that is almost like communicating emotions (2014). Silverman states we connect certain tones and tempos with certain feelings, for instance a ballad is almost always played in a minor key with a slowed tempo, and conversely we connect a major key and a quick tempo with feelings of happiness …show more content…

Concurrently we expect to find that listening to music that they would not normally listen to will have an even stronger negative impact on our participants recall ability compared to the control, or silent condition. We believe that given the complexities of how the human mind processes music, that trying to add in the equally complex task of reading or memorizing the human mind will simply be overloaded with information. We believe this overload will cause them to perform worse than they would if they were trying to complete those tasks without the distraction of music. These effects have been demonstrated in younger students in the study by Anderson and Fuller (Anderson 2010) we expect to find that these effects are the same in college

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