Page 78, Peopleware (Creative Space paragraph) - Tom De Marco
"During the 1960s, researchers at Cornell University conducted a series of test on the effects of working with music. They polled a group of computer science students and divided the students into two groups, those who liked to have music in the background while the worked (studied) and those who did not. Then they put half of each group together in a silent room, and the other half of each group in a different roo equipped with earphones and a musical selection. Participants in both rooms were given a Fortran programming problem to work out from specification. To no one's surprise, participants in the two rooms performed about the same in speed and accuracy of programming. As any kid who does his arithmetic homework with the music on knows, the part of the brain required for arithmetic and related logic is unbothered by music -there's another brain center that listens to the music.
The Cornell experiment, however, contained a hidden wild card. The specification required that an output data stream be formed through a series of manipulations on numbers in the input data stream. ... Although the specification neves said it, the net effect of all the operations was that each output number was necessarily equal to its input number. Some people realized this and others did not. Of those who figured it out, the overwhelming majority came from the quiet room.
Many of the everyday tasks performed by professional workers are done in the serial processing center of the left brain. Music will not interfere particulary with this work, since it's the brain's holistic right side that digest music. But not all of the work is centered in the left brain. There is that occasional breakthrough that makes you say 'Ahah!' and steers you toward an ingenious bypass that may you save month or years of work. The creative leap involves right-brain function."
He says too that noise is a big penalty (more than music) on creativity (not productivity).
What he says makes sense. I'm a 'boss' and i like to hear music (headphones). I let my people to hear music. But when I/we need to design a new procedure, new algorithm, new interface, or to solve a big error in a production program, we switch off our music (winamp, mp3 player, tuner, whatever we hear) and concentrate our effort into the problem.
But thats 20% of our work. Rest of the time we can listen without problems.
I talked this with some coworkers (2 of them) and all agree with this.
