A new study suggests that playing music is instrumental to being able to smoothly switch between tasks
In psychology, the term 'task switching' describes the ability to
quickly shift your attention between two tasks. Previous studies have
suggested that there are many benefits to playing a musical instrument or being bilingual, including enriching mental development and better cognitive function.
A team of psychologists from York University in Canada were
interested in seeing if the skills held by musicians and bilingual
individuals could help them with task switching. They predicted both
groups would perform better than average, but the results showed that
only one outperformed the rest.
The study, published in the journal Cognitive Science,
involved 153 students who were separated into four groups - monolingual
musicians, bilingual musicians, monolingual non-musicians, and
bilingual non-musicians. The musicians had an average of 12 years of
formal musical training, and 88 percent of them were instrumentalists.
The participants were asked to complete a number of tests that
measured their ability to switch between two mental tasks. In one
activity, they were “required to track a moving white dot (while) at the
same time, they attended to single capitalized serif letters flashing
one at a time in the centre of the computer screen. Participants were
required to click the mouse button whenever they saw the target letter
X," says Tom Jacobs from Pacific Standard.
The results showed that the musicians performed much better than
non-musicians, but surprisingly, the bilingual participants did not.
"Musicians' extensive training requires maintenance and
manipulation of complex stimuli in memory, such as notes, melody, pitch,
rhythm, dynamics, and the emotional tone of a musical piece," write the authors of the study.
They report that this meticulous training "may help them to develop
superior control to respond efficiently to stimuli in an environment
where both switching and non-switching components exist."
More research is yet to be done, but in the meantime, why not tune up on your multitasking skills by learning an instrument.
