If you’ve ever switched on some background music to help you learn, you’re onto something. Music doesn’t just help you relax, it wields a potent influence on how your brain processes and retains information. A recent study in Nature Communications delves into how this happens.

it’s long been recognised that music  has a significant effect on moods and emotions, but its impact on learning is just starting to be understood.  Researchers from UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) have discovered that the mood changes you experience when listening to music create ‘boundaries’ between the events you experience. Those boundaries make it easier to remember what is seen and when you have seen it.

Essentially, the boundary-creation process helps your brain group and categorise  information.  This, in turn, helps you remember and organise new concepts more readily. Psychologists call this “contextual binding,” and it’s a powerful tool for learning.

Think of it this way. Your brain is involved in a perpetual tug-of-war between binding memories together and separating them. This push-and-pull process helps you store and process information efficiently. When you listen to music, it is easier for your brain to create the event boundaries needed to form strong memory recall.

As a result, your brain changes the way it binds information together. Which means it can learn more efficiently.

So, why not give it a shot? Switch on your favourite tunes while tackling that challenging task or learning something new. You may be surprised at how much easier it becomes to remember and process information. Find out more from the original article here.

This article summary was created by Eleanor Shakiba

Eleanor is a leadership trainer, success coach and people skills expert. She helps managers and business owners build thriving teams and organisations, using tools from Positive Psychology. She's trained more than 60,000 people during her career as a corporate trainer and professional development consultant. Her mission is inspiring talented people to become leaders who make a difference. 

We all like to think we make wise decisions. From choosing washing powder to making great investment choices,  we tend to believe that our decisions are based on logical and well-thought-out reasoning. However, it turns out this is rarely the case. Indeed, many of your decisions will be impacted by cognitive  biases – which are essentially mental shortcuts that help you make decisions quickly.

A classic example is loss aversion.  This is a bias caused by the fear of losing something and it can lead to rash decisions. For example, a well-known study showed that when people lose $100 they feel the loss far more intensely than they feel joy at finding $100. In experiments, this meant that participants were more likely to take a risk with a $100 note they found than with money that they already had in their bank account.

Why was this illogical?  Because in each situation there is $100 at stake and the odds of winning or losing are exactly the same. This example demonstrates how loss aversion can overpower rational thinking and risk assessment. It also shows how framing effects can impact decision-making. In psychology, framing refers to how your perception of something is influenced by the way it is presented.

Something as simple as whether a problem is framed in terms of winning or losing can radically affect your choices. For example, researchers Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky asked volunteers to choose the best treatment to offer to people with a serious disease. Two options were given. Both had identical success rates. However, Option A was framed as having a 90% success rate. Option B was described as having a 10% risk of death. Option A was chosen by most people, even though it had exactly the same outcome as option B!

This example highlights the fact that even when presented with identical information, people can be heavily influenced by how the information is framed. The good news is that recognising these biases can help you make better decisions in your personal and professional life.

Awareness is key. Once you know about cognitive biases and how they can impact decision-making, you can take steps to mitigate their effects. If you want to dive deeper into this topic, you can check out the original article here. Trust me, understanding how your choices are affected can help you make smarter decisions in all aspects of life.

This article summary was created by Eleanor Shakiba

Eleanor is a leadership trainer, success coach and people skills expert. She helps managers and business owners build thriving teams and organisations, using tools from Positive Psychology. She's trained more than 60,000 people during her career as a corporate trainer and professional development consultant. Her mission is inspiring talented people to become leaders who make a difference. 

When you’re going through tough times, it’s normal to try and understand what is happening. The way you explain events to yourself is called your ‘explanatory style’. And that style just might be increasing your stress. An interesting article about this can be found on the Very Well Mind site. Here’s a quick rundown on what that article says.

Three dimensions of internal explanation

You draw on three factors when explaining events to yourself: stability; globality and internality. You assess stability by deciding if an event or situation is a one-time thing is likely to happen again. Your assessment of globality is based on your assumptions about when an event impacts your entire life or just a portion of it. Finally, your beliefs about whether things happen to you or are caused by you create your ‘internality’.

Why does this cause STRESS?

So how do those three factors impact your stress? Put simply, the explanations you create can impact on your emotions.  If you assume a bad situation will go on forever, for example, your assessment of stability will trigger a stress reaction. As the Very Well Mind article points out “optimists tend to have more positive explanatory styles—ones that minimise stressful situations as unstable, local, and external and take credit for positive experiences as being more stable, global, and internal”.

What to do about it

The good news is that you can change your explanatory style fairly easily. First, you need to identify and correct cognitive errors. This are flawed thinking patterns and often are linked to deeply held beliefs about stability, globabilty and internality. You can learn to question these errors and create a more positive (less stress-inducing!) style of thinking.

So the next time problems emerge in your life, remember this: your thinking impacts your well-being. Developing a positive explanation style helps you handle stress and become more resilient. Recognise cognitive distortions, set goals and express gratitude to explain things positively.

You can read more in the original article here.

This article summary was created by Eleanor Shakiba

Eleanor is a leadership trainer, success coach and people skills expert. She helps managers and business owners build thriving teams and organisations, using tools from Positive Psychology. She's trained more than 60,000 people during her career as a corporate trainer and professional development consultant. Her mission is inspiring talented people to become leaders who make a difference.