By Catherine de Lange
Some schools are pumping music, noises and fragrances into the classroom to see
if it improves exam results could it work?
What did your school smell like? Was it noisy or peaceful?
It might not seem important, but a growing body of research suggests that
smells and sounds can have an impact on learning, performance and creativity.
Indeed, some head teachers have recently taken to broadcasting noises and
pumping whiffs into their schools to see whether it can boost grades. Is there
anything in it? And if so, what are the implications for the way we all work
and study?
There is certainly some well-established research to suggest that some noises
can have a detrimental effect on learning. Numerous studies over the past 15
years have found that children attending schools under the flight paths of
large airports lag behind in their exam results.
But general noise seems to have an effect too. Bridget Shield, a professor of
acoustics at London South Bank University, and Julie Dockrell, now at the
Institute of Education, have been conducting studies and advising politicians
on the effects of all sorts of noises, such as traffic and sirens, as well as
noise generated by the children themselves. When they recreated those
particular sounds in an experimental setting whilst children completed various
cognitive tasks, they found a significant negative effect on exam scores.
Everything points to a detrimental impact of the noise on children s
performance, in numeracy, in literacy, and in spelling, says Shield. The noise
seemed to have an especially detrimental effect on children with special needs.
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Shield says the sound of babble the chatter of other children, is
particularly distracting in the classroom. Architects that fashion open-plan
classrooms in schools would do well to take this on board. People are very
distracted by speech particularly if it s understandable, but you re not
involved in it. This phenomenon is also known as the irrelevant speech effect,
she says, adding that it s a very common finding in open-plan offices as well.
Whether background sounds are beneficial or not seems to depend on what kind of
noise it is and the volume. In a series of studies published last year, Ravi
Mehta from the College of Business at Illinois and colleagues tested people s
creativity while exposed to a soundtrack made up of background noises such as
coffee-shop chatter and construction-site drilling at different volumes. They
found that people were more creative when the background noises were played at
a medium level than when volume was low. Loud background noise, however,
damaged their creativity.
This makes sense for a couple of reasons, says psychologist Dr Nick Perham, at
Cardiff Metropolitan University in the UK, who studies the effect of sounds on
learning but was not involved in the study. Firstly, he says, sounds that are
most distracting tend to be very variable. A general hum in the background
suggests a steady-state sound with not much acoustical variation. So there s
not much there to capture your attention nothing distracting the subjects,
he says. At the same time, the background noise might cause the subjects to be
in a slightly heightened state of arousal, says Perham. You don t want too much
or too little arousal. Medium arousal is best for good performance. So it
might be that a general hum in the background gives an optimum level of
arousal. With that in mind, Perham suggests there may be some benefit to
playing music or other sounds in an art class or other situations where
creativity is key.
Many teachers all over the world already play music to students in class. Many
are inspired by the belief that hearing music can boost IQ in subsequent tasks,
the so-called Mozart effect. While the evidence actually suggests it s a
stretch to say classical music boosts brainpower, researchers do think pleasant
sounds before a task can sometimes lift your mood and help you perform well,
says Perham, who has done his own studies on the phenomenon. The key appears to
be that you enjoy what you re hearing. If you like the music or you like the
sound even listening to a Stephen King novel then you did better. It didn t
matter about the music, he says.
However, it s worth considering that music is not always helpful while you re
trying to work. Trying to perform a task which involves serial recall for
instance, doing mental arithmetic will be impaired by sounds with acoustic
variation, which includes most types of music, says Perham. (Except a few, like
extreme death metal.) Songs with lyrics, on the other hand, are more likely to
interfere with tasks that involve semantics such as reading comprehension.
The task and the sound are important, when you have both of them using the same
process then you get problems, he says.
So, it seems that schools that choose to screen out disturbing noises and
create positive soundscapes could enhance the learning of their students, so
long as they make careful choices.
This isn t the only sense being tweaked to affect learning. Special educational
needs students at Sydenham high school in London are being encouraged to revise
different subjects in the presence of different smells grapefruit scents for
maths, lavender for French and spearmint for history.
Less research has gone into the idea of whether scents can help with cognitive
performance, although there have been intriguing findings. In 2003,
psychologist Mark Moss, at Northumbria University, carried out a range of
cognitive tests on subjects who were exposed either to lavender or rosemary
aromas. Rosemary in particular caught my attention as it is considered to be
arousing and linked to memory, he says, whereas lavender is considered to be
sedating. Moss found that those who were smelling lavender performed
significantly worse in working memory tests, and had impaired reaction times
for both memory and attention-based tasks, compared to controls. Those in the
rosemary group, on the other hand, did much better than controls overall in the
memory tasks, although their reaction times were slower.
Why might this be? It s perhaps not surprising that smells affect memory, given
that the brain s olfactory bulb is intimately linked to the hippocampus, which
deals with learning. But Moss suspected there was more to it. To explore the
pharmacological effects of rosemary on the body, he drew blood samples from
volunteers who had just undergone cognitive tests in a rosemary-infused room,
and found that they had elevated levels of a compound called 1,8-cineole in
their blood. Previous research has shown that this compound increases
communication between brain cells, which might explain how it improves brain
function.
So, as you finish reading this story, take a moment to tune into your senses.
Close your eyes and take a few nice deep breaths. What can you hear and smell?
The answer, it seems, may affect how much you learnt in the past few minutes.