Hey! Imagine that!
It’s official…
Happy music makes you more creative – if you’re engaged in some activity that requires you to generate new ideas (divergent thinking), you’re more likely to come up with unique ideas, and more of them, than if you don’t listen to happy music.
Of course, you have to define your own happy music. It’s no good somebody else dictating that to you. We each have our own internal jukebox and what’s happy to you may be nothing of the sort to someone else.
You may remember my story about a conference I went to, where the speaker (quite rightly) suggested that motivating music would have you exercise harder and faster at the gym, but then chose to demonstrate this with his own choice of music, whereupon I burst into tears!
Each to his own then!
Meanwhile, new research at Radboud University in Nijmegen, Holland suggests that if instead of needing to think creatively you need to solve problems (i.e. convergent thinking), no amount of any sort of music will help you do that.
Instead, silence is golden.
