some people find reading boring I mean it is just text on paper how could it be interesting right well I for one heavily disagree with that but some do find an escape in comic books or graphic novels since they have visual aids which arguably makes the experience more enjoyable I personally take this a step further and like to listen to music while I read my comics the question is should I really be listening to music and reading texts and looking at pictures all at once is it sensory overload l
et's find out hello and welcome to the show at the shoes i'm auram you know the guy you spammed with the seesnake comments and i'm here on the nerdsync channel because apparently i lost my way to my channel somehow anyway today our goal is to find the answer to this main question is it beneficial to listen to music while reading comic books to start off let's look at the results of a poll that we conducted on the nerdsync Twitter account we posed the question do you read comics with or without m
usic and provided three answer choices with music without music and a little bit of book 13% said that they read with music 34% said they do a little bit of both and a whopping 53% said that they read with no music this surprises me because personally I read with music all the time I just find that silence allows my mind to wander too much and the music keeps me focused so over half of the 300 people that participated in this poll don't read comics with music why is this a while back when I orig
inally did this episode over on my channel I conducted the same survey on a couple of subreddits many people commented with their opinions on the matter with some saying that they'd like to completely involve themselves in the comic and that anything else is a distraction while others were in full support of having music on so long as it is either provided play Lisbeth the tone very well or is just some kind of instrumental piece this I actually heavily agree with whenever I listen to music whil
e reading it's always instrumental most of the time film scores the reason for this personally is I just find it less distracting and more atmospheric than music with lyrics it sometimes can even set the mood of the comic which loops back around so why some people only listen to music if there is a provided playlist or they know of a song or score that fits the tone of the comic perfectly so right now the answer seems to be that most people don't listen to music while reading but those who do li
ke instrumental pieces let's dive a little deeper with another poll that I found on good raise calm they asked 2500 people a broader blanket question is listening to music while reading distracting and they provided 5 answers it depends on the type of music yes kind of I do it all the time and no 38% of people said that it depends 31.6% said yes 11% said kind of 9.8 percent do it all the time in nine twenty six percent said no so this is really just lending more towards that it depends on the ty
pe of music answer we got earlier and lessons the flat-out no which is both good and bad it's a blurrier and less definitive answer but it actually gets us closer to figuring out the perfect recipe for our actual brain I mentioned this briefly earlier can our brains actually even take in all of this information at once this is where all the science mumbo-jumbo comes into play that you guys seem to love so much here on nerdsync we've pretty much decided at this point that people will listen to co
mics with music as long as it's instrumental otherwise they find it too distracting but why is this let's start with a 2014 study conducted by doctors Nick param and Harriet Curie the experiment involved four groups of participants one that read a passage with instrumental music one that read a passage with lyrical music that the participant either liked or disliked and the control one that read with no music at all after they read their passages they would quickly take a questionnaire on the co
ntent of the passage which allowed param and Currie to see how each type of music affected their volunteers what's interesting here is that the instrumental and control group scored significantly higher than the lyrical groups on the test what this means is that music with lyrics actually hinders our reading comprehension but instrumental music or just plain ambience seemingly doesn't affect us this is because of the phonological loop which is one of the main concepts that have a part in how our
brain store memories the phonological loop is in charge of handling auditory and vocal sounds such as speaking or listening to lyrics and songs this is what your brain is doing when you hear that sort of echo in your head as they're being said it's processing the information and deciding whether to store it for later or just to throw it away this is also the reason why instrumental music has less of an effect on us than lyrical music does the phonological loop is able to more quickly process in
strumental music because of its lack of verbal lyrics let's move on to a little more brain science with a proposition and Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow he explains that the brain is composed of two systems with the interactions between the two determining how we think and act system one controls all the automatic and involuntary impulses like breathing or things that just becomes second nature this stems from unconscious evolutionary survival instincts that were advantageous to o
ur ancestors who need to make rapid judgments and actions to avoid death like a jump-scare system to controls all the conscious decisions and tasks that require an intense focus like choosing what to say or trying to find Waldo and sneaky little red and white minutes can't ever find him now don't get this confused with the left-brain right-brain myth that's been floating around in pop culture for ages that is simply not true yes one hemisphere of our brains can handle certain tasks more dominant
ly than the other hemisphere this is called lateralization but there is no evidence to suggest that creative people are more right brained dominant or that analytical people are more left brain dominant your brain uses both hemispheres and tandem for almost every task so when we're talking about systems of the brain it's important to not get that confused with literal physical regions of the brain but what's important here is determining which system takes care of the different stimuli that pres
ent themselves while reading a comic book with music the songs the art and the text on the page the interesting thing here is that the individual stimulus will jump between the two systems depending on what task you're focusing on at the time ideally you'll be using your focus from system 1 on the comic and just have the music on as kind of a background noise that doesn't really take your attention away from the story but if the music is distracting while trying to read you'll more easily forget
what you just read the art stimulus is more of a non-issue here but for someone who is more artistically inclined you could get lost in it and forget to actually read the words and of course there's the flip side of this argument which I'm actually a bit guilty of myself where you could get lost reading and not notice what's going on in the art at the time volume of the music could also be a factor a study from the University of Illinois found that noise around 70 decibels helps you become more
creatively cognizant for comparison that's about the level of an average shower which coincidentally is why you tend to get those Eureka moments when you're showering but those good effects go away at about 85 DB which I know on paper doesn't sound like that much of a difference from 70 DB but it's actually over twice as loud it's about the level of a blender or snow blower so obviously you don't want to be listening to music that loud while you're also trying to concentrate on another attentio
n demanding tasks the researchers found that at 85 dB the noise becomes the distraction that actually inhibits your ability to process information so you know probably don't blast music while you're reading it's not helping and the people in the apartment below you don't appreciate it either John so some of you might now be thinking that I have no idea what I'm talking about because you always listen to music while reading and it's never distracted you or lessen your reading comprehension becaus
e you're a great multitasker well I'm here to jump on my high tell you that multitasking is a big fat lie in fact it's impossible our brain simply can't handle completely focusing on more than one task at a time when you think you're multitasking your brain is actually just quickly switching between tasks as you call for them think of it as trying to watch two movies on the same monitor but you have to keep quickly switching between them to understand what's going on once both movies are over yo
u're going to have a seeming lack of understanding of both sure you'll be able to remember bits and pieces but your comprehension went down drastically as opposed to if you had just been focusing on one movie the reason for this is because your brain is being overloaded when trying to multitask it has to save a certain amount of power for the first task the second task and the actual task of switching between the two it's like the saying goes you could be mediocre at a lot of things or you could
master one now that I've thrown all this science and pull results at you let's try and make sense of it all of those who read comics with music most will likely choose a piece or playlist that is instrumental seeing as lyrics can be a bit distracting we know from the Perim and courier experiment that lyrics can in fact hinder comprehension and that instrumental music has no effect on us but on the flip side we know that multitasking is impossible and can potentially slow us down so the big ques
tion should you read comics with music scientifically not unless it's instrumental but that's up to you and your brain really the problem lies and whether or not you're going for comprehension and ease or just for the fun of it instrumental music has been proven to not have much effect on comprehension but it also provides another stimulus that our brains could potentially latch on to and slow us down in our main goal finishing and understanding the comic book at hand it generally makes the whol
e experience more enjoyable and if you feel like you missed some things because of it so what just take another look at the book it's not like it's going anywhere I would however advise against reading with lyrics flying around in your headphones that just gets messy so what do you all think do you read comics with music if so what type of music do you normally listen to let us know in the comments before I go I guess I should clarify another reason why I'm here I'm one of the video editors on t
he nerd sync team so there's that if you want to check out some more of my stuff then go ahead and click this annotation right here and check out an episode of the show with issues where I talk about a bunch of alternate universe versions of Deadpool I hear he has a movie coming out or something soon or you can always stick with the nerd sync goodness and check out the latest episode of comic misconceptions and of course be sure to hit that big shiny subscribe button so you don't miss out on any
thing us here at nerdsync cook up for you that all being said once again i'm auram and i'm gonna go back to editing now buh-bye you [Music]
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