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Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, listening to music engages the creative part of your brain and severely limits what you can do, but this is not readily apparent.

If I listen to music, I can spend an hour CODING YEAH! and be all smug and satisfied, until I turn the music off and discover that everything I've coded is unnecessary and there is an easier way to achieve the same goal. I just didn't see it, because the creative part of my brain was busy listening to music.

From the post, it sounds like the author discovered the same thing: if you use AI to perform menial tasks (like coding), all that is left is thinking creatively, and you can't do that while listening to music.

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There is no “creative part of the brain” and even if there was listening to music would have nothing to do with it.

You may be experiencing getting to different understanding of sth when you switch context. Similar to when you are stack it may be better to go for a walk than keep your head on top of a piece of paper or screen. I have had many of my breakthroughs while taking a shit in the toilet in the midst of working. Others experience similar with showers and whatever.

Afaik most ppl listen to music during certain tasks because it helps focusing. Esp when working in a busy office it really helps me to listen to certain kinds of predictable music to keep me from getting distracted. It creates a sort of entrainment that helps with attention.

Some people find music itself distracting, I myself find some kinds of music distracting, or during certain types of tasks. Then it obviously it does not fill its purpose.

I describe it slightly differently. Similar to what the author described, I'll first plan and solve the problem in my head, lay out a broad action plan, and then put on music to implement it. But, for me the music serves something akin to clocks in microcontrollers (and even CPUs), it provides a flow that my brain syncs to. I'm not even paying attention to the music itself, but it stops me from getting distracted and focus on the task at hand.

I just think it's distracting. I get caught up listening to the lyrics and kind of mentally singing along, stuff like that which disrupts my thought and distracts from what I actually want to be thinking about.

I think this is individual, I have the same problem in social settings - if I'm having a conversation and a song I like is playing in the background I some times stop listening to the conversation and focus on the music instead, unintentionally.

My solution is to listen to music without vocals when I need to focus. I've had phases where I listen to classical music, electronic stuff, and lately I've been using an app I found called brain.fm which I think just plays AI generated lo-fi or whatever and there's some binaural beats thing going on as well that's supposed to enhance focus, creativity etc. I like it but some times I go back to regular music just because I miss listening to something I actually like.

Same here on all fronts about distractions. I can't tell whether when people talk about listening to music while working/studying: (1) they mean music with no lyrics, (2) they are unserious and okay with their work being constantly interrupted, or (3) they can resist thinking about the lyrics.

Some work may allow for seamless pivoting between work vs. enjoyable distraction, e.g., a clerk, but I often hear about people listening to music in other contexts.

The work is not always to implement some complicated algorithm. Sometimes it is just routine work. There's already so much noise outside so having the music give something for the brain to latch on instead of having to react to all those other stimulus. For me it's a playlist that I know very well, which then becomes background noise.

Sometimes I listen to music without lyrics like surf or gabber. Other times its genre music like northern soul or punk or familiar music where the lyrics are so familiar or vacuous/cliche that they don't distract. I wouldn't listen to really lyrically focussed music like singer songwriter stuff generally. So I think there's a spectrum rather than just instrumental music vs everything else.

> discover that everything I've coded is unnecessary and there is an easier way to achieve the same goal

In my experience, there is no good shortcut to this realization. Doing it wrong first is part of the journey. You might as well enjoy the necessary mistakes along the way. The third time’s the charm!

I'm sorry but that's nonsense. Listening to music is not a creative process, it does not at all take away creativity from somewhere else.

I've never, ever, ever once in 40 years of coding listened to music while coding and later found the code "unnecessary" or anything of the sort.

I engage in many creative pursuits outside of coding, always while listening to music, and I can confidently say that music has never once interfered in the process or limited the result in any way.

I don't think that's down to music per se, but a more generalized thing. Software developers love being in a flow state, some of them pursue it all the time (...guilty) and get frustrated when their job changes (e.g. moving towards management) so they spend less time in that flow state.

But also, this can create waste, in that people write the Best Code Ever in their flow state (while listening music or not), but... it wasn't necessary in the first place and the time spent was a waste. This can waste anything from an hour to six months of work (honestly, I had a "CTO" once who led a team of three dozen people or so who actually went into his batcave at home for six months to write a C# framework of sorts that the whole company should use. He then quit and became self-employed so the company had to re-hire him to make sense of the framework he wrote. I'm sure he enjoyed it very much though.)

This was actually studied at some point (at least 15-20 decades ago, as I remember learning about this in college): they gave the same programming problem to a bunch of developers and had some listen to music while they did the task while others worked in silence. There was no real difference between how long it took to do the task between the same group... but the people who listened to music were much much less likely to realize that the entire task was a red herring and the code reduced down to return 0;.

Your experience suffers from confirmation bias.

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