When intellectual fatigue moves at the end of a long day, his own old responsibilities suddenly become much more complicated and he feels that he cannot think clearly. In a new study, there may be another undeniable solution for other people who avoid caffeine: a short workout or listening to music.
Using exercise to make your brain transparent is a well-known trick, if you walk during your break, you probably feel more rested afterwards than if you were sitting at your desk, but in a recent study published in the journal Neuroscience, researchers at the University of Bourgogne Franche-Comté in Nice, France, found that listening to your favorite music has a very similar effect.
They recruited 37 volunteers and asked them to perform a series of tasks. They first had to temporarily hit a series of targets on a screen, and then they performed a cognitively not easy task for part of an hour. Some participants then took a 15-minute break from physical activity while cycling on a training bike, while others listened to music of their choice for 15 minutes. After that, they did the final task of temporarily re-pointing the touch targets on the screen. Among those tasks, they completed questionnaires to assess how intellectually tired they felt. In a control experiment without exercise or music, other people reported that they felt less intellectually tired after taking a 20-minute break, but did not fare as well on their last scoring task as they did on their first. Even though they didn’t feel tired, they weren’t as alert as before. On the other hand, the organization that exercised and the organization that listened to music performed better on this final task than the other people who just took a break, suggesting that exercising and listening to music reduced their intellectual fatigue.
This was a very small examination, with only a dozen people in each group, so there was a lot of variation between individuals. Although everyone arrived well rested at the beginning of the experiment, some felt much more intellectually tired than others the test. Therefore, it is difficult to draw vital conclusions from this study, but it turns out that it corresponds to other studies. For example, this year, a study examined the functionality of runners when they were intellectually exhausted and found that listening to music helped them succeed over some of the intellectual fatigue.
The precision with which music and training assistance eliminate brain fog is something researchers are still seeking to understand. This may be similar to the release of dopamine, but this is verified with new experiments.
Still, those are activities that are easy to incorporate into your day if you’re feeling mentally exhausted, and if you can’t drink coffee or don’t have the option to move around for a few minutes, it’s smart to know that listening to your favorite music can be just as effective at temporarily clearing your brain’s cobwebs.
I am a freelance science writer, focused on research stories. My writings on the intersection of science, art and culture have been published in Undark, Nature, The
I am a freelance science writer, focused on research stories. My writings on the intersection of science, art and culture have been published in Undark, Nature, The Scientist, Hakai Magazine and elsewhere. I’ve also spent a decade running in the box for clinical outreach and networking for educational teams and publishers. I have a master’s degree in chemistry from VU University Amsterdam, a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Toronto and a seat in the violin segment of an amateur orchestra in London.