An international team of experts led by psychologists from the University of Southern Denmark discovered that relaxing background music reduces heart rate and breathing, which has a positive effect on cognitive performance. They talked about it in a magazine article. Journal of Cognitive Development.
The researchers divided 108 volunteers into four groups, three of whom listened to jazz, piano compositions, and lo-fi (a genre characterized by poor recording quality and jazz chords), and a fourth, the control, who listened to nothing. Over three days, the researchers measured participants’ attention span and distraction, as well as respiratory rates and heart rate variability, both while listening to and after listening to music. Participants then listened to music on their own regularly for three weeks.
Control tests showed that listeners, regardless of genre, had reduced reaction times, slowed breathing and heart rate, compared with both the control group and their own results at the beginning of the experiment.
In the future, scientists propose to study the influence of other types of music – previous studies have shown that music can impair cognitive activity, but perhaps the point is not in music, but in its individual characteristics. It is also possible that the effect is related to how much a person likes music in general.