Musicians are better at multitasking

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.

The first language you learn affects how you hear all others, study finds

New research offers fresh insight into how the first language we learn affects our experience of all the subsequent ones we come across. Scientists in Canada have found that our original language creates certain patterns in the brain that are perhaps never lost.

The influence of this 'locking in' of the brain is still evident even when all knowledge of the first language has disappeared from memory. It appears to inform the way we hear the sounds and words of subsequent languages we come into contact with during our lives, as though our brains have become hardwired in one particular formation or tuned to one particular language.

The team from McGill University and the Montreal Neurological Institute looked at three groups of adolescents: those who only speak French, those who speak both French and Chinese fluently, and adopted teens who originally knew Chinese as babies but now only speak French. MRI scans were used to monitor brain activity while French pseudo-words were played. Interestingly, the same areas of the brain 'lit up' in the bilingual speakers and the monolingual speakers who originally knew Chinese.

In those who had known Chinese at a very early age but are no longer bilingual, their brains handled words as if they still were. The researchers think this could help us understand more about how we learn languages and how that process changes as we get older.

"The adopted children we tested have an interesting background because they were exposed to one language from birth, but completely discontinued that language at a young age when they were adopted into families who speak a different language," said one of the researchers, Lara Pierce. "This is very interesting from a language development perspective because it allows us to look at the influence of just that very early period of language development on later language processing, separately from the effects of ongoing exposure to one or more languages."

It may help explain why learning a language as a baby is so effortless and why it becomes much harder later in life, at least for some of us: our brains have already been 'set' in a certain configuration. As Pierce notes, very young children have been shown to be incredibly adept in picking out words that help in their language learning and dismissing other sounds - a skill we tend to lose in later life.

The study has been published in Nature Communications.

Li-Fi has just been tested in the real world, and it's 100 times faster than Wi-Fi

Expect to hear a whole lot more about Li-Fi - a wireless technology that transmits high-speed data using visible light communication (VLC) - in the coming months. With scientists achieving speeds of 224 gigabits per second in the lab using Li-Fi earlier this year, the potential for this technology to change everything about the way we use the Internet is huge.

And now, scientists have taken Li-Fi out of the lab for the first time, trialling it in offices and industrial environments in Tallinn, Estonia, reporting that they can achieve data transmission at 1 GB per second - that's 100 times faster than current average Wi-Fi speeds.

"We are doing a few pilot projects within different industries where we can utilise the VLC (visible light communication) technology," Deepak Solanki, CEO of Estonian tech company, Velmenni, told IBTimes UK. 

"Currently we have designed a smart lighting solution for an industrial environment where the data communication is done through light. We are also doing a pilot project with a private client where we are setting up a Li-Fi network to access the Internet in their office space.”

Li-Fi was invented by Harald Haas from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland back in 2011, when he demonstrated for the first time that by flickering the light from a single LED, he could transmit far more data than a cellular tower. Think back to that lab-based record of 224 gigabits per second - that's 18 movies of 1.5 GB each being downloaded every single second.

The technology uses Visible Light Communication (VLC), a medium that uses visible light between 400 and 800 terahertz (THz). It works basically like an incredibly advanced form of Morse code - just like switching a torch on and off according to a certain pattern can relay a secret message, flicking an LED on and off at extreme speeds can be used to write and transmit things in binary code. 

And while you might be worried about how all that flickering in an office environment would drive you crazy, don’t worry - we’re talking LEDs that can be switched on and off at speeds imperceptible to the naked eye. 

The benefits of Li-Fi over Wi-Fi, other than potentially much faster speeds, is that because light cannot pass through walls, it makes it a whole lot more secure, and as Anthony Cuthbertson points out at IBTimes UK, this also means there's less interference between devices.

While Cuthbertson says Li-Fi will probably not completely replace Wi-Fi in the coming decades, the two technologies could be used together to achieve more efficient and secure networks.

Our homes, offices, and industry buildings have already been fitted with infrastructure to provide Wi-Fi, and ripping all of this out to replace it with Li-Fi technology isn’t particularly feasible, so the idea is to retrofit the devices we have right now to work with Li-Fi technology.

Research teams around the world are working on just that. Li-Fi experts reported for the The Conversation last month that Haas and his team have launched PureLiFi, a company that offers a plug-and-play application for secure wireless Internet access with a capacity of 11.5 MB per second, which is comparable to first generation Wi-Fi. And French tech company Oledcomm is in the process of installing its own Li-Fi technology in local hospitals.

If applications like these and the Velmenni trial in Estonia prove successful, we could achieve the dream outlined by Haas in his 2011 TED talk below - everyone gaining access to the Internet via LED light bulbs in their home.

"All we need to do is fit a small microchip to every potential illumination device and this would then combine two basic functionalities: illumination and wireless data transmission," Haas said. "In the future we will not only have 14 billion light bulbs, we may have 14 billion Li-Fis deployed worldwide for a cleaner, greener, and even brighter future."