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That's where you repeat things to yourself to remember them. They also found that children under age 7 in particular are bad at memorization because their brains are not yet able to employ a key tactic known as rehearsal. 'Music with lyrics is more distracting than music without lyrics.' 'It could be music with lyrics,' she says. 'So that tells us that somehow being processed in the cognitive system, because you can't just willfully go, 'I'm going to not listen.''Įlliott and her team found that the critical ingredient of distraction is sound that changes in some noticeable way.

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'In general, performance goes down when you're asked to remember a series of things in order in the presence of irrelevant or distracting auditory stimuli,' Elliott found. Then they told the children that sounds would be playing but not to pay attention to them, because they weren't relevant. Elliott and her colleagues devised a test in which they gave young children a visual task of memorizing a series of items on a screen.

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'We can close our eyes, we can avert our gaze, but we hear in 360 degrees,' says Emily Elliott, a psychology professor at Louisiana State University who studies memory and cognition and is one of the authors of a study about how auditory distraction affects a young child's ability to perform serial recall tasks. Noise is especially distracting to young brains

People who have trouble hearing often experience listening fatigue. It can become physically exhausting as well. The more that DJ has to do, the less operating power is available for your brain, making it harder to process new information. Kraus uses the analogy of a DJ sitting at a mixing board in your brain, assessing and adjusting sounds that come in all day long. So when there is even just a moderate level of background noise, like traffic or a truck idling, our brains process more slowly. But Lee Montessori is in Washington, D.C., a city that is surround-sound cacophony: busy highways, screeching commuter trains, jarring car horns, waterways with the blare of boat whistles and the seemingly constant whir of presidential and military helicopters and the drone of commercial airplanes. Around the world, fans of silence have begun to catalog the world's disappearing quiet places. Silence is difficult to find and to create - for adults and kids alike. She believes turning down the noise in our lives starts with embracing - even enjoying - silence. ' brains are craving sound-to-meaning connections, so it's very important that the sounds around them be nourishing and meaningful,' says Nina Kraus, a neurobiologist at Northwestern University. But when their environment is quiet enough for them to pay attention to sounds that are important or particularly interesting to them, it is a powerful teaching tool.

That's because if noise is just, well, noise, it distracts developing brains and makes it more difficult for children to concentrate. And studies show that too much noise, particularly loud noise, can hurt a child's cognitive development, notably for language-based skills such as reading.

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Unlike this classroom, the city outside is full of noise. 'We create the conditions for children to concentrate.' 'Silence is kind of a peak achievement in a child's ability to control themselves,' Mejía-Menendez says. No one is talking louder than what's often referred to in Montessori schools as 'the hum.' Steve uses ASL as part of a broader approach to minimize noise in the classroom. This isn't a school for students with hearing disabilities, but Mr. Steve silently responds by nodding his head along with his fist, which is sign language for 'yes.'īlink, and you could miss the whole interaction. When the lesson arrives at a natural stopping point, the student is invited to ask his question, and Mr. He uses American Sign Language to say 'wait' - palms facing up, fingers wiggling - and the child waits quietly. This kind of distraction happens all the time in classrooms around the United States. Steve, as he's known here, is talking a few students through a geometry lesson when another student approaches to ask an unrelated question.

He's a pre-K teacher at Lee Montessori Public Charter School's campus in Southeast Washington, D.C., and although I'm here to meet him, I almost don't spot him because he's eye level with his students. A group of small children sits cross-legged with their teacher, Steve Mejía-Menendez, on a round carpet.