Sunday, August 07, 2005

Face the Music

Most of the people around me listen to music while working. I see them with ear-phones/ headphones, nodding their heads, enjoying their music, and their work. Even I have tried that lots of times, and miserably failed. I have found that if I am in the midst of something serious and interesting, which requires a lot of my concentration, I just can't listen to music. If I am listening to it, I lose the hang of whatever I am doing and my mind gets involved in the music.
The music just takes over the whole of my mind and I sort of lose my context completely.
I don't know. It might be that I am poor at concentration, or it may be that I am more interested in music, or it might also depend on what kind of music I listen to.
But, whatever it is, this is how I am...

7 comments:

Krishna said...

Right Srk,I very much feel like the same way.Its alright if I am just going through some non-technical documents.But if it requires some amount of concentration then I simply have to turn off the music.Maybe our brains are not inherently programmed for multitasking :)..

Anonymous said...

I dont think thats true i believe that we have been trained to do only one thing at a time and so we tend not to use it efficiently , it probably just requires some decoupling and practice to start using all our senses paralelly for different things.

~gururaj said...

Well .. I think our brains have a lot of capabilities of Multitasking. Even what we have never heard of.

And by the way there a lot of types of music. Music which require u to ponder over. Music which stimualtes the brain internally. Music which rattles u all over.

I can do both listening to music while working or reading or anything except while talking :-)

While coding I listen to music. Dont ask me what was the song. But I have observed that at that time my brain responds very well. May be music acts as the stimulator ... I dont know..

And any way i dont underestimate Human Brain.....

Anonymous said...

Hmmm...what you say applies to me to. To me, music comes in two categories: music that hurts and everything else.

Any music which belongs to "Everything else" is pretty listenable and pretty much takes over my mind.

I find myself humming and getting interesting images: not at all relevant to what I'm trying to do.

It depends upon person to person, and unless this really threatens your efficiency, it's not something you should fight.

Karthik said...

I kind of agree with all of you. It definitely depends from person to person, as the variety in the comments to this post itself shows.

Vinay V said...

Well, many a times I listen to music. But you can hardly call what I do as "work". In fact, I work for 20% of the time & waste the remaining 80% of the time checking mails, listening to music, etc. So, I cannot exactly determine whether music is a hinderance to work or not. But one thing is for sure. I cannot listen to music if I have to do any serious thinking. esp., with headphones. I sometimes have the speaker on (in a low volume) when working.

Anonymous said...

I can work like that only if I am doing something without thinking.