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Earworms and Sleep: What Will They Research Next?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
November 06, 2022

Earworms and Sleep: What Will They Research Next?

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Just last week, I spoke with middle- and upper-school students about learning.

Student lying in bed listening to music on earphones

We all know — and these students certainly know — that learning is hard. So, does cognitive science have any practical suggestions to help them study and learn?

Yes, reader, it does.

We know that retrieval practice helps learning much more than simple review.

We know that multitasking really isn’t a thing.

And, we know that exercise and sleep really help learning.

This last point — the importance of sleep — can be tricky.

After all, students say that they don’t have time to sleep — they have too much homework.*

Several students asked me: “I’m having trouble falling asleep. What do you suggest?”

In the moment, I suggested having a routine. Go to bed at the same time every night (as much as possible).

But, just a few days ago, a new study came across my desk…

Music and Sleep

I’ve often written about Dr. Michael Scullin’s research (for instance, here and here). He typically researches really practical questions. And, he studies and writes about them in unusually clear ways.

So, I’m a fan.

His most recent study looked at an unexpected topic: earworms.

You know: those infuriating tunes that get stuck in your head.

You just can’t get rid of them. (No, I’m not going to mention a song about very young scary fish that have huge teeth and eat seals and occasionally terroize people. “Doo doo doo doo doo doo.”)

What effect do earworms have on sleep?

Questions and Answers

Research into sleep can get quite technical. We start talking about “spindle detection” and “polysomnography” and “frontal slow oscillation activity.”

Rather than go into the details, I’ll offer a quick summary of the conclusions:

First: survey results suggest that most people (87%!) think that listening to music will improve sleep (or, at least, not harm it).

However — a big however — people who reported listening to relatively more music also report relatively lower sleep quality.

Second: the same survey results suggest that “earworms” make up a big part of this problem.

That is: the more music I listen to, the more earworms I experience. And, the more earworms I experience, the worse I sleep.

YIKES.

Third: you might think that music with lyrics results in more earworms than music without lyrics. Scullin’s team, in fact, thinks that’s the “intuitive view.”

Well, as so often happens, our intuitions are wrong.

Believe it or not, people who listen to instrumental versions of popular songs have more earworms — and worse sleep — than those who listen to the songs themelves.

So, What To Do?

What advice should we be giving students about sleep — other than, “get at least 8 hours”?

Scullin’s team sums up their study this way:

There are few behaviors as prevalent in young adults as listening to music, and many regularly listen to music as part of their bedtime routine. Listening to music feels relaxing, but familiar and repetitive music can trigger involuntary musical imagery that worsens sleep quality and daytime functioning.

In other words: to reduce earworms and sleep better, don’t listen to music before going to sleep. And, instrumental versions of popular songs seem to be especially likely to generate earworms.

I can’t believe I’m typing this, but: Listener beware!

* When students say to me, “I can’t sleep, I have too much homework,” I say, “Let’s think about this:

‘Homework’ is anything that helps you learn more.

Sleep helps you learn more.

Therefore, sleep is homework.

Do your sleep homework, and you will learn more.”

Scullin, M. K., Gao, C., & Fillmore, P. (2021). Bedtime music, involuntary musical imagery, and sleep. Psychological Science, 32(7), 985-997.

Does Music Training Help Us Pay Attention?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
November 19, 2019

Does Music Training Help Us Pay Attention?

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Schools help students learn specific skills and facts: long division, and the preamble to the US Constitution, and glorious mysteries of the sonnet.

Wouldn’t it be great if schools could improve general cognitive capabilities?

For instance, it would be AWESOME if we could artificially increase working memory capacity. (Alas, we can’t. Really.)

It would be great if we could teach general critical thinking skills. (Alas: although we can teach those skills in discrete disciplinary topics, we probably can’t teach critical thinking generally.)

I would be super helpful if we could improve our students’ ability to pay attention…wait a minute: maybe we can.

We know that musicians must concentrate intensely to accomplish their marvelous work. To focus on the sheet music, ignore myriad distractions, accomplish nimble finger skills—all these require impressive degrees of attention.

Does all that attending help musicians both play music better and pay attention better? In other words: can they use those attention skills in other parts of their life?

Defining Attention

To answer that question, we have to start by defining the concept of “attention.”

Surprisingly, psychologists and neuroscientists don’t see attention as one unified thing. Instead, the see it as a behavior that takes place when three other things are happening.

First, they measure alertness. That’s a basic biological readiness: are the students awake enough? Or, so wildly overstimulated that they can’t focus? Those questions examine alertness. (Notice: they don’t directly examine attention—alertness is one small part of that bigger picture.)

Second, they measure orienting. When we ask about orienting, we consider the stimuli that the student is consciously perceiving.

So, for instance, at this moment I’m orienting to the letters on the screen as I type, to the mug of tea to my right, and to my cat Pippin who keeps nudging my arm. I’m not orienting to—say—the comfy chair in the corner, or the color of paint on the ceiling, or the gentle thump of the laundry machine downstairs.

I know all that stuff is there, but I’m not consciously processing it. (Well, I suppose, now that I’m writing about it, I must be processing it. But, I wasn’t orienting to it until I tried to identify stimuli that I wasn’t orienting to…)

Finally, to define the third part of attention, we consider executive attention. That segment takes much more time to describe and define, and overlaps a lot with working memory. It also includes our ability to ignore unimportant stimuli. We deliberately decide to focus on this topic here, not that one there.

So, when we ask the question “does music training improve attention,” we’re really asking three questions:

“Does music training improve alertness?”

“Does music training improve orienting?”

“Does music training improve executive attention?”

With these three questions in mind, we know what to do next.

Musician Inhibition

 To test attention, researchers often use the Attention Network Test (ANT) to measure all three sub-segments of our attentional processes.

In this study, scholars in Chile worked with about 40 adults. Half were “professional pianists,” with an average of more than 12 years of music training. The other half had never taken music lessons, and couldn’t read sheet music.

Did the musicians outperform the non-musicians on the ANT?

No, no, and yes.

That is: musicians and non-musicians did equally well at the first two parts of attention: alertness and orienting.

But, musicians scored higher on the executive attention part of the test than the non-musicians did.

Basically, they ignored irrelevant stimuli better than their age-matched peers.

What Does This Research Mean in the Classroom?

 You can probably anticipate all the reasons we shouldn’t over-react to this study.

It’s quite small: fewer than 40 people participated.

It doesn’t necessarily show cause and effect. It’s entirely possible that people who start with better executive attention are more likely to become professional musicians than people with lower executive attention.

The professional musicians had YEARS of musical experience: more than twelve, on average. So: even if music training does improve executive attention, it’s not a quick fix.

At the same time, this study does suggest something important: at least in this one case, we might be able to train a general cognitive capability.

That is: we can’t speed up our students’ working memory development. We can’t train a general critical thinking skill. We can’t improve processing speed.

But, maybe, we can find ways to strengthen executive attention.

Given how important attention is in the classroom, that’s potentially great news indeed.

Why, and When, Does Music Interfere with Reading?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
September 20, 2019

Why, and When, Does Music Interfere with Reading?

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We all know that listening to music makes life better.

And, we teachers all know teachers that listening to music while you study makes studying harder and less effective.

For instance, in this study, adults who read in silence scored more than 20% higher on a quiz about that reading passage than others who listened to music with lyrics.

Indeed. 20% higher. (You can read more about that study here.)

Even though we’ve seen this research finding many times, we might want a deeper understanding of this question.

For instance: are there particular points during reading that are particularly vulnerable to interference from music?

Answer #1: New Songs

To answer this question, researchers used eye-tracking technology to see how readers behaved with background music playing.

One answer that jumped out: the change from one song to the next interrupted fluent eye movements.

This finding, of course, makes intuitive sense.

When a new song comes on, we automatically perk up our ears. Even subliminally, we notice a change in our background circumstances. The attention we devote to that change makes it harder to attend to our reading.

The result: less fluent eye movements.

Professor Todd Rose (at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education) used to suggest that–if students insisted on listening to music–they should make a playlist of songs. Those songs should have no lyrics.

And, crucially, students should not press shuffle. They should, in other words, listen to those songs in the same order each time. Over time, students will habituate to those songs in that order, and be less distracted by the switch.

This research supports Rose’s suggestion.

Answer #2: Vocabulary

The second time that music particularly distracts readers: when they face an unusual word. As the authors poetically put it:

“An irrelevant auditory signal may impair sublexical processing of low-frequency words during first-pass reading.”

“An irrelevant auditory signal” means “music,” and “low-frequency words” means “difficult vocabulary.”

So, if you were listening to music while you read that paragraph you’d face particular difficulties. After all, in included several low-frequency words.

Based on this observation, I think we should worry more about homework that includes complex vocabulary–and, I’m guessing, even more so about homework that includes foreign-language vocabulary.

In other words: while listening to music is bad for reading comprehension, it’s especially bad for comprehension of passages with tricky vocab.

To Sum Up

We’ve always known that students make their cognitive lives harder when they listen to music during homework.

Now we have even more evidence showing when, and why.

Why Do Piano Lessons Improve Language Skills?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
July 22, 2018

Why Do Piano Lessons Improve Language Skills?

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For some time now, we’ve had evidence that early musical training improves later language skills.

(Of course, not all evidence points this way.)

music and language

If it’s true that music lessons help language development, we might wonder why? What is the relationship between music and language?

Perhaps music training makes people generally smarter, and that “general smartness” improves everything — including language skill.

Or, perhaps those lessons improve students’ ability to hear sounds precisely — and that skill transfers to language improvement.

Which theory pans out?

Music and Language: Piano Lessons in China

Researchers in China worked with three groups of 4- and 5-year-olds.

Twenty five of them got six months of piano lessons. Twenty five got reading lessons. And twenty five got neither kind of training.

Did these children develop differently? That is: were their language skills different? Were there IQs different? How about their working memory scores?

On the general cognitive measures, all three groups advanced equally.

That is: IQ scores, working memory scores, and attention scores all improved — but they improved roughly the same amount for all three groups.

Music lessons (and reading lessons) didn’t slow down cognitive development, but they didn’t speed up that development either.

Music and Language: Vowels and Consonants

However, when it came to speech sounds, the different kinds of training did make a difference.

The 4- and 5-year-olds who studied piano, and also those who practiced reading, improved in their ability to recognize vowel sounds. And: they got better faster than those who did neither of those things.

Also: those who studied piano got better at recognizing consonant sounds faster than both the other groups.

Needless to say: recognizing consonants is really important in language processing. Children need to distinguish between “had” and “hat,” “morning” and “warning,” “choose” and “shoes.”

This study starts to answer our question. Music doesn’t make us smarter in a general way, but it does help us tell sounds and words apart.

The Bigger Picture

Researchers often want to know about “transfer.” Does learning one thing make me better at this other, largely unrelated thing.

For example: do piano lessons in childhood make me better at calculus in high school? (It’s really hard to be sure.)

This study offers evidence to support a kind of “near-transfer.” Learning to distinguish among musical sounds helps children learn how to distinguish among consonant sounds. (But, not vowel sounds.)

However, it does not support a “far-transfer” hypothesis. Music training didn’t make children “smarter,” at least not in the ways that we typically measure “smart.”

At the same time, other researchers have found a relationship between music lessons and memory.

As always, look at the very narrow claims that researchers make and support. We should resist the temptation to generalize — especially when we’re talking about “transfer.”