Comment by solistice
11 years ago
I guess having something running in the background saturates your mind better? I certainly do it, switching from silence to music to lets plays to episodes of QI to MOOC lectures depending on how mentally engaging whatever i'm actually doing is at the moment. Otherwise my mind wanders off the topic at hand and i end up browsing hackernews for far too long.
Sitting at a computer means that there's about 10 possible distractions for me at a given moment, and if I want to do a consistent stretch of actual work, i just happen to need some background noise.
The only thing is the familiarity. If you've heard the song or watched the video a few times, it no longer interrupts focus and actually helps improve it.