Put Down the Phone, Pick Up the Trumpet

How Musicianship Can Help Prevent the Downsides of Multitasking

            We all live exceptionally busy lives.  Between work, reading, caring for our pets and families, it can seem impossible to dedicate enough time in the day to each task.  As a result, we often multitask in order to get everything done in a timely fashion.  All of this multitasking comes with a downside, however, in that each focus logically receives less attention than if we were to dedicate ourselves fully to the task. 

            As New York Times article “The High Price of Multitasking” mentions, this lack in efficiency is not a matter of great importance when the stakes are low, as in a conference call.  But in situations such as driving or combining studying with relaxing by watching television, people generally tend to overestimate their ability to multitask, even saying that they are able to be more efficient while multitasking.  Listening to music is the most common form of multitasking because it heightens arousal, but this is considered a trade-off of emotion for cognition.  I can attest to that, as there have been many times that I have become lost in the music while trying to finish a chapter of a book, but I would agree that even with rereading, I was able to read for much longer than without the music.

However, it would seem that a history of musicianship has the opposite effect of multitasking and listening to music.  In 2016 article “Executive Function, Visual Attention and the Cocktail Party Problem in Musicians and Non-Musicians” a link was made between musicianship and cognitive factors. Through a series of tests, it was found that musicians’ results on tests of auditory working memory and spatial hearing (with speech masking) significantly differed from that of non-musicians. That is, that musicians were found to be able to focus on, remember, and differentiate more sounds than non-musicians.  Musicians are defined in this article as having had at least 10 years of formal musical training, while non-musicians had minimal to no training.  These results showed that a musician should excel in an environment like that of a cocktail party, where many conversations are happening at once and an individual’s attention is divided. 

This is very similar to the example that the New York Times articles gives us of multitasking while studying and watching television.  Dividing your attention between the material that you should be reading (or the lecture that you should be listening to) and music or Netflix is not something that I am going to recommend, but I would be lying if I said that I would never do it again.  This information does, however, make me regret putting my instrument down.  Maybe if I had kept on going, I could learn neurobiology and the Easter eggs in Better Call Saul at the same time.

References:

Clayton KK, Swaminathan J,Yazdanbakhsh A, Zuk J, Patel AD, Kidd G, Jr (2016). Executive Function, Visual Attention and the Cocktail Party Problem in Musicians and Non-Musicians. PLoS ONE 11(7): e0157638. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.015763

Willingham, Daniel T. “The High Price of Multitasking.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 14 July 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/07/14/opinion/multitasking-brain.html?searchResultPosition=1.