Do Homework and Music go Together?

You might be making a mistake if you’re not letting your child listen to music while they do their homework. Some think better with music, and the correlation becomes more evident if you look at musical history.

American and Canadian researchers have discovered something they call the “Mozart effect.” The researchers found that students who listened to relaxing music during a quiz were less stressed and achieved better results than the control group, which didn’t listen to music. In psychology, this kind of internal stress is called “cognitive dissonance,” an internal conflict or thoughts that don’t go together. For example, you have to do a challenging assignment but want to relax. Overcoming this kind of stress is essential to learning, and therefore music might help us when we’re learning something new. In this way, music might have played a crucial role in learning since the stone age.

Many cultures don’t bother with reading or writing. But every culture has music. The researchers who discovered the Mozart effect think that music affects our emotions by making us relaxed, alert, happy, sad, or angry, depending on what’s needed. The amygdala processes these emotions in our brains. This tiny brain area communicates with the Hippocampus, which is connected to memory. There is a significant connection between thoughts and feelings where music might have a role in this way. Maybe this explains why musicality is so central to every society. From an evolutionary perspective, humans who knew how to make and understand music might have been better at learning and more likely to survive. These abilities are inherited. Music that makes us happy fights stress and helps us make decisions.

So what kind of music is ideal for homework? It’s important to choose the right kind. It would be best to opt for something relaxing that doesn’t require attention. It only has to create a feeling of calm and focus so that the brain can concentrate on what it’s supposed to learn. Bear in mind that this isn’t true for everyone. Some people learn better in silence.