For years, I wondered why I could study better in a noisy place than in a quiet one.
It seemed backwards.
A library should have been perfect.
A private study room should have been even better.
No conversations. No televisions. No music. No movement. Just me, my books, and silence.
But silence did something strange to me.
I became distracted by the silence itself.
I would get up.
Walk around.
Check something.
Take a break.
Find another reason not to remain seated.
Then I would sit in a coffee shop, put on my earphones, or position myself somewhere with ordinary background noise, and suddenly I could work.
For years, I wondered why.
Eventually, I stopped wondering and started experimenting.
I changed the environment.
I changed the music.
I changed the amount of food I had eaten.
I changed whether I snacked while studying.
I changed when I took breaks.
And I watched myself.
One thing became particularly interesting.
When I continuously ate small snacks while reading, I felt as though my attention was divided. I was not necessarily doing badly, but I was giving my brain another task.
Read.
Chew.
Swallow.
Read.
Reach for another bite.
Read again.
When I removed the continuous eating and simply kept water nearby, something changed.
I could stay with the material longer.
Then I would take a deliberate break, eat something, and return to the book.
That worked better for me.
I had another observation that made me curious.
I know several people who take stimulant medication for ADHD. I do not take Adderall, but hearing them describe their experience made me curious about the medication’s effects. They described being able to become intensely focused on a task, sometimes with a noticeable reduction in appetite.
So I studied how the medication works.
Adderall contains amphetamine salts, which increase signaling involving dopamine and norepinephrine. Appetite suppression is one of its recognized effects.
I began wondering whether some of what I was experiencing while deeply engaged in a task could resemble one small aspect of that experience: when I became highly absorbed in studying, food simply became less important to me for a period of time.
But there was an important distinction.
I was not taking Adderall, and I was not trying to reproduce the pharmacologic effects of a stimulant medication. I was simply observing my own behavior and asking a physiological question.
That distinction became important to me.
The environment was even more interesting.
A completely silent room did not always produce my best performance.
Moderate stimulation seemed to help.
Music helped.
Background noise helped.
A busy coffee shop sometimes helped.
I began thinking about the brain systems involved in attention, reward, arousal, inhibition, and motivation.
I remembered my neurophysiology teacher talking about inhibition and disinhibition.
I began wondering whether my problem was not that I needed less stimulation, but that I needed the right amount.
There is a difference between distraction and stimulation.
There is also a difference between stimulation and overload.
Perhaps my most productive environment was somewhere in between.
I even drew a graph.
I imagined time on one axis and my performance on the other. I compared my experience in very quiet environments with my experience in environments containing music or moderate background activity.
My graph was not a laboratory measurement of dopamine.
I had not measured neurotransmitters.
It was a graph of my behavior and performance.
That distinction matters.
I was not proving that Starbucks increased my dopamine.
I was observing that Starbucks sometimes increased my productivity.
The biology underneath that observation is more complicated.
Attention is influenced by multiple interacting systems, including catecholamines such as dopamine and norepinephrine, arousal, motivation, sensory input, habits, expectations, and individual differences.
The brain does not have one simple “productivity chemical.”
And that is precisely what made my little experiment interesting.
I was not discovering a universal law.
I was discovering something about myself.
I began to understand that studying medicine was not only about memorizing what the brain does.
Sometimes it was about watching my own brain work.
I became my own little laboratory.
Every day I changed something.
Different environment.
Different meal.
Different time.
Different music.
Different break schedule.
Different amount of stimulation.
Then I watched the result.
I learned that productivity is not always found by removing every possible distraction.
Sometimes the goal is to find the environment in which the brain is stimulated enough to remain engaged but not so stimulated that the task itself disappears.
And perhaps that is one of the lessons medicine teaches us repeatedly:
The same intervention does not produce the same response in every person.
We study populations.
We study averages.
We study mechanisms.
But eventually, we meet an individual.
And the individual is where medicine becomes personal.
That is where my study desk became my laboratory.
And that is where I began learning not only medicine, but myself.
Author’s note: This is a personal observation and reflection, not a recommendation to use stimulant medication, fast excessively, or deliberately deprive oneself of food in order to study. My observations are about my own concentration patterns and prompted me to explore the physiology behind them.
By Joan A.Roberts
