We have been trying to recover the concentration for years using white noise. These researchers believe that we are self -taught

In 1984, the German director Philip Gröning He wrote to the prior of the Great Cartuja requesting permission to record a film about the isolated and lonely life of the Cartujos monks in the heart of the French Alps. That is, about the great silence. The monks told him they had to think about it and thought about it for 16 years.

He left everything recorded in ‘Into the great silence‘And every time I cross the movie I think about the same thing: that this deep and dense silence is an endangered species.

In the modern world We can only use noise cancellation And, if perhaps, put on white, pink or brown noise. Or we believed.

But is it really for something? That is what Joel T. Nigg and his colleagues from Oregon Health & Science University have wondered. In A recent article They have systematized everything that is known so far and, although there is good news, their conclusions are a jug of cold water.

To start because, although it is an issue that is spoken a lot, there is no quality research that is based. NIGG’s team He just found 13 Useful studies (with 335 participants in total). The sample was limited, but enough to explore how the different types of noise affect the attention and cognitive function in young children and adults.

And what have they discovered? Indeed, as we thought“White and pink noise improve performance in tasks that require attention for those who have ADHD symptoms.” For going to the data, they found “a small but significant positive effect (improvement of between 8 % and 10 %) in the executive care” of these people. In addition, the results are surprisingly consistent.

In fact, it seems, those who were not medicated, obtained better results.

What is the problem, then? That the effect is reverse in the case of people who did not have ADHD. “In this case, white and pink noise negatively affected the performance in the task,” Emily Reynolds explained.

A notice to navigators. Because on the one hand, it is a good sign that, often, the information we obtain online, from mouth and even the theoretically reliable sources. The evidence available in these fields is usually much more anecdotal than we would like to confess.

However, we should not exaggerate the conclusions of this work. After all, as the authors themselves saidthe investigation is scarce and not as good as we would need. That allows us to draw some conclusions, discard some things; But do not unbrush all the pitch.

So … we must stop putting white noise? At least we should rethink it if what we want is to concentrate. It can be used for other things and, who knows, there may be cases that are better than the alternative (listening to music, having the background TV …); But in general terms, it seems that it would be necessary to rethink it a bit.

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