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Comment by amw-zero | Hacker News Reader

As it turns out, people have differently structured brains. I cannot write code and listen to music at the same time, for example.

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>As it turns out, people have differently structured brains.

Or maybe some just dellude themselves (and e.g. lose congnitive capacity with music, but conflate their hapiness boost for increased productivity, etc.).

This "differently structured brains" was the once popular idea behind different "learning styles" (visual learner, etc.) who has been discredited since.

Evolutionary it's more probable we have quite identically structured brains when it comes to main functions, and just have different e.g. cultural tastes on top.

Aphantasia would be a good example of clear differences in how people's brains operate (and one that anecdotally seems to be not that uncommon among programmers). Given that it only has gotten real scientific attention in the last 10 years it doesn't seem unreasonable that other major variations exist that we don't know about yet.

"Learning styles" are a great example IMO of non-scientists taking an idea with some merit and running away with it, to the point that scientists stop investigating it pretty much altogether because it's been branded "pseudoscience". Yeah the term learning styles itself is probably at this point a red flag for education pseudoscience, but the idea that different people may naturally solve the same problem in different ways is still very much an open question. It is probably true to at least some extent (as can be seen in certain extreme examples e.g. non-verbal vs verbal specific learning disorders).

Another example of this broader phenomenon is galvanic skin response. People ran with the lie detector BS and then the whole field basically died for a few decades, only to eventually be rebranded "electrodermal activity". Probably your smart watch will be collecting EDA in a few years.

There is a great interview with Feynman where he recounts that he could count while reading, and a colleague called shenanigans. So, they did some experiments together. Fun watch, but seems in contradiction to your point. :(

If I recall correctly he talked further about this in one of his autobiographies (Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman possibly?).

It was about the repeatability of counting to a minute, and he experimented on the difference between seeing a timer tick in your minds eye and hearing a count increment in your head.

It was What Do You Care What Other People Think?.

He had been experimenting with what he could do while counting, and found he couldn't count while talking, but could count while reading. John Tukey didn't believe him, and thought it should be the other way around. It turned out Tukey and Feynman counted completely differently, Tukey by visualising and Feynman using internal speech, and so Tukey could count while talking, but not while reading. So, not the same person doing both methods.

Wait.

1) You don't think people have different learning styles? 2) You don't think that I know what distracts me while I'm working? 3) You don't think that evolution produces _vast_ diversity, and that people have vast differences in brain structure?

Before COVID, music was certainly less distracting than practically available alternative, everything being said on your office floor.

I prefer silence also, but even music with lyrics was better than the sales guys cold call pitch, somehow that absolutely SHATTERED my flow state without fail.

Strangely enough I find working in the "white noise" of a coffee shop lets me hit flow state even better than silence. Not sure if thats more due to the "i'm in this place to do the thing" effect or the actual noise though.

See, this one does not bother me. Indistinct chatter / noise does not distract me in the slightest. In fact, that sound is actually a great environment for me to focus - total silence can actually be distracting for me.

Music on the other hand, I cannot program while listening to. Brains are different.

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