Does Listening to White Noise Help You Learn?

Most people have trouble focus when there are distractions, and that will surely impair learning. Learning can be impaired by distracting background sounds. That is why teachers generally support students to study in quiet environments. Children, however, like extra stimulation when studying, perhaps because they view study as boring. So, a common pattern is to play music or even have the radio or TV on.

Personality of the learner may be an crucial variable. Adrian Furnham and Lisa Strbac of University College, London, found that both background music or office noises impaired performance of Introverts in tasks involving reading comprehension, mental arithmetic, and prose recall. Studies examined have shown that performance in silence was the same for both personality types, suggesting that introverts have a special need for silence in their study environments.

You may have seen that the notion has surfaced that it might be beneficial to mask distracting sounds by playing white noise while studying. Reason is that white noise is a random mixture of sound frequencies that when heard in low volume can improve detection of a simultaneous isolated signal with equal power of any frequency. Perhaps this is because the presence of a homogenous signal (white noise) improves the contrast with a novel superimposed signal. Some of the factor might be the brain’s usual response of habituating to a constant stimulus, effectively creating an empty-stimulus state in which other stimuli would be augmented. A couple of years ago, a study was reported indicating that a white-noise background can improve memory in youngsters with Attention Deficit Disorder.

What happens in a brain unprotected and exposed to white noise has been revealed in fMRI brain-scan studies of young adults. The study’s behavioral test indicated slightly improved recognition memory of scene images and scans. It showed that an associated increased activity occurred in brain positive reinforcement pathways and in auditory cortex.

Caution is needed in interpreting these results. One caveat is that the study of adults used recognition memory (as in, “Do you remember seeing this scene?”), which is much less robust than being able to generate a recall without cuing. Another caveat is the lack of systematic evaluation of the decibel level of white noise. At some point, the sound is certain to be distracting or even irritating. In fact, people on average report that such noise is slightly aversive and strongly aversive by some subjects. The adult study used a white noise of 20-5000 Hz at 70 dB via headphones. If one does not deliver white noise via headphones, other sounds in the room could negate whatever beneficial effect white noise might have.

It was assessed by Steven Smith at the university found that recall of memorized words was better 48 hours after learning if the sounds used during word presentation, either music or white noise, were repeated during the recall session. This reflects a common observation that recall is enhanced if you are tested in the same environment as when you learned the test material. Using sound in this way is not practical in school situations, but it could improve and change the efficacy of self-testing in one's home environment.

Consequently we should not accept uncritically the studies that advocate white-noise backgrounds during learning. One study revealed that exposure to background noise improved performance for absentminded children but worsened performance for attentive children. Research suggests that white noise may be a distraction for attentive children and only helps with inattentive children because their innate distractibility is activated less when the noise background is monotonous and uninteresting.