The Link Between Attention and Music

Attention is a cognitive ability essential to our daily lives and one of the key productive factors in the modern economy. It is a way of prioritizing information. Our capacity to acquire and process information is fundamentally limited. Attending to one task or source of information necessarily excludes other potential efforts.

Individual resources (e.g., cognitive ability) and environmental factors (e.g., the presence of reward or stimulation) influence attention capacity. Music, as an external factor, can improve attention. Music isn’t just for entertainment. Research shows that listening to music improves performance on attention tasks (Kiss, 2021). Listening to music can help make tedious assignments easier to endure.

Music listening affects attention in various ways (Mendes, 2021):

1. Tune out distractions.

Music causes a narrowing of attention, allowing our minds to filter out distractions. Music helps to decrease stress and cortisol, which allows the brain’s attention center to operate without interruption.

Music might also promote an attentional conflict. For example, when driving in an unfamiliar area, we tend to turn down the music because it acts as a distraction. And by doing so, the brain can allocate more cognitive resources to visually process the road and surroundings. The challenge is to maintain a delicate balance of stimulation without distraction.

2. Boost your mood.

Music can improve performance on attention tasks by altering mood and motivation. One explanation for this result is that listening to preferred or enjoyable music increases pleasant mood and arousal levels as well as motivation. For example, when we are performing a boring task, music can stimulate our mind, resulting in better performance.

However, a piece of music needs to be in the right tempo to be able to evoke the appropriate arousal and mood. For example, listening to fast instrumental music at a high volume tends to negatively affect a task requiring high concentration. In contrast, for simpler cognitive tasks, listening to fast music could be beneficial. While calming and relaxing tunes, such as classical and instrumental music, tend to have more positive effects on more complex tasks that require high levels of accuracy.

3. Music without lyrics

Music without lyrics usually works best when a person needs to focus. It tends to help people pay more attention. Music with lyrics can be distracting when a task requires high concentration. Lyrics interfere with memory retention and can cause information to mix with specific lyrics. In contrast, instrumental music is not distracting.

4. Benefits of music for people with ADHD

Music can have a positive effect on attention in individuals with attention difficulties, as evidenced by improvements in on-task performance in children with attention issues (Martin-Moratinos, 2023). Abnormal levels of a chemical in the brain called dopamine are thought to contribute to the symptoms of ADHD. Listening to music has been shown to increase dopamine in the striatum, enabling those with ADHD to stay focused on a task. Furthermore, dopamine modulates reward circuits associated with music, providing pleasure responses similar to sex, food, or money.

Source: Martine / Pixabay

In sum, attention is a cognitive function essential to the performance of activities in daily life. Research findings show that music can improve attention, especially listeners’ preferred music or music without lyrics (Homann, 2023). If you’re doing any sort of mindless, repetitive task, music can help your brain filter out distractions and stay alert.

Usually, familiar music that you enjoy is the most effective for maximizing concentration. However, there is an inverse U-shaped relationship between pleasure and familiarity. First, it increases, but after a while, once your brain gets used to it, the returns are diminishing. The sweet spot, for most people, is somewhere in the middle.