If I play different sounds while people do reading comprehensions and memory activities then 40 Hz binaural beats will allow for the most focus because it is quiet, non-repetitive or high pitched. Many people also associate calm music with work and being stress-free which helps people feel comfortable while listening, making focus improve. As well the low sound pulse will add rhythm to your workflow.
 

Focus, the What and the How.

Focus and concentration are vital aspects of everyday life, letting you take everything in your attention field and only thinking about a specific item. Although focus is different in everyone's brain, with some focusing easily and others finding it hard to focus, the process in each section is similar. The prefrontal cortex uses slow pulses of electricity to relay information and it usually is associated with focus. The parietal cortex also plays a role in focus as it is a survival instinct that uses fast pusles to allow you to think quickly when new stimuli appear and switch your attention. To filter out those distracting stimuli the thalamus stops processing the sensory input that your attention is not directed at. Overall, focus can be a complex process, engaging many parts of the brain with focus being unique to each individual.

The Timing of Focus

Focusing can be hard at one point in the day, but come naturally in another, this could be the time, the place or even the objects in the environment. Studies from Nolan G. Pope, M. Blake and many other scientists have shown that the time of least focus is the afternoon. This is because of our circadian rhythm, a natural clock in our body that controls the sleep cycle. Between 2-4pm your wakefulness dips, making the sleep pressure larger than your wakefulness. Though the evening pushes you out of the slump making them a productive time. Mornings can also let you be focused, but only an hour after waking so the melatonin completely leaves your system. Typically where you are located also plays a factor in concentration levels, if you are in a safe place, distraction free then you will focus best. It all depends on what feels the best for each individual person. Not only do those factors play a role, but so does age. Although most cognitive and vision functions start to weaken slowly after the age of 20, the time you can focus continues to increase until around the age of 43 before slowly decreasing. Overall, focus is best in the mornings or evenings depending on each person, their sleep, stress, age and the tasks.

Better Focusing

Everyday we have tasks necessary to pay attention to and put our most focus into, but focusing can be difficult. Many distracting stimuli are around causing the parietal lobe to divert your focus elsewhere as a survival instinct. To stop distractions, remove the possibility of new stimuli, put away unnecessary electronics and work in a place where not as many people will interrupt. Making reasonable goals can also help, giving an urgency to tasks. Similarly, breaking down projects and not multitasking can help. The “Load Theory of Attention”, proposed by Nilli Lavie, suggests a limit to how much attention we have, and if the perceptual load is low, unnecessary stimuli get your attention in order to fill use all the resource. This is why many people listen to music or other calming sounds while working to fill your attention capacity. In the end, focusing depends on removing chances of new stimuli, giving tasks urgency and filling your attention capacity.

Load Theory of Attention

The True Multitasking

Many people will multitask, or do multiple things at the same time, to get things done quicker. But multitasking is only your brain quickly switching between each task, reducing productivity by up to 40%. Multitasking typically takes longer and has more mistakes, if one task is automatic like walking or listening then it will be easier and may be quicker. But if you are focusing on too many tasks or stimuli the brain will get overloaded, with it not able to keep up with signals coming in, therefore delaying the output. Not only is multitasking slower, but our brain has a limited energy flow using 20% of our energy and typically burning 400-500 calories just to keep it running. Although focusing hard only increases your burnt energy by up to 5 calories an hour, the brain will shut off non-essential functions for your focused task if pushed hard enough. Overall, multitasking is less efficient, as the brain has to switch back and forth between them, losing productivity and speed.

Drowning out Specific Senses

With many distractions unnecessary to process our brain will do just that and stop processing distracting sensory information. It starts with the prefrontal cortex deciding to not need a specific sense, or deems a sense distracting. The prefrontal cortex will then send a signal to the striatum, a part of the basal ganglia to control reward, which sends another signal to the globus pallidus. The globus pallidus is also a part of the basal ganglia, but it controls conscious movement. The globus pallidus then stops the thalamus from processing the corresponding sense, in the corresponding nuclei. The thalamus receives all information from senses except smell and movement before sending it to the cerebral cortex to be fully processed. The thalamus helps keep us awake as well as focus on a specific sense. The brain can also drown out specific sounds it finds unimportant while still processing the important sounds. The brain can do many impressive things with our senses, letting us have our full attention on the things that matter.

Sound and Emotions

Emotion and sound can often highly affect each other, as the amygdala, or the emotion center, is highly sensitive to noise and hearing. Emotions will get attached to certain sounds giving a familiar sound a familiar feeling and new sounds stored with the emotion felt as you heard it. The linkage between sound and emotion is especially prominent in fear, the amygdala's specialty. With sound processing in the same part of the brain as emotions, certain sounds can give us a fear response to help us survive, such as sudden noise, loud noises or high pitched noises. The opposite happens for when we enjoy a sound, or piece of music with it calming us and improving focus. Music is just noise with a beat that sounds enjoyable to people, and low pitched, soft noises can also be enjoyable or calming for people. All in all, the experience and emotions imprinted on sounds can give us fear and stress or happiness and relaxation, all depending on the amygdala.

How the Ear Works

The ear is a complex and very important part of our bodies that we use daily. The ear starts with the outer ear called the auricle or pinna. This collects soundwaves and funnels it into the ear canal, which amplifies 2000-8000 Hz frequencies. At the end of the ear canal is the eardrum, a delicate piece membrane that vibrates when sound hits it. Behind the eardrum in the middle ear are the malleus (hammer), incus (anvil) and stapes (stirrup) together known as the ossicles and are the 3 smallest bones in the human body. The eustachian tube is also in the middle ear, connected to the back of the nose to pressurize the middle ear. The stapes sends the vibrations into the cochlea or the inner ear, a spiral organ filled with liquid that has over 25,000 hair cell nerve endings in it. Those cells then transmit the intensity, frequency + timing down the 8th cranial nerve (auditory nerve) into the thalamus then the auditory cortex and amygdala. The ear is a complex organ, important to many tasks in our day to day lives down to just communicating and if any of these important parts got damaged, the ear would fail making every last part essential.

Ear Diagrams

The Movement of Sound

Although a sound wave alone moves in a straight line, other objects or even other sound waves can interfere and cause a change in movement or property. Although infinite sound waves can be in one space, as it is not a form of matter, sound waves can combine either constructively or destructively. When 2 sound waves are vibrating in the same phase or are in sync they will combine and increase the amplitude, but if they are in opposite phases they will cancel each other out. Sound waves can also change movement through diffraction, refraction and reflection. Diffraction is when a sound wave bends around an object, this creates a muffled effect in the noise. Refraction is where a sound wave changes directions as a result of a change in speed, for example speaking into the wind your voice refracts up and is lost. Voices also diffract if there is a change in speed from moving from one medium to another. A reflective is when sound waves “bounce” off an object and become an echo. Sound waves have a variety of factors that change its movement or sound, making an everyday process of hearing more complicated than originally thought.

Sound Wave Diagram

Sound, Amplitude, Intensity and Frequency

Although we hear almost effortlessly, sound itself has many big and complex components to it to carry as much information through the air as it does. A soundwave is dispelled energy as particles move, changing the pressure and creating compressive zones and rarefactions in a transverse wave, moving continuously forward. There are many characteristics of a soundwave including, but not limited to, intensity, frequency and amplitude. Frequency is perceived as the pitch of a sound and is how many cycles, or compressive zones happen in a set amount of time. Humans can hear between 20 Hz - 20,000 Hz, but hear best between 2000 Hz - 5000 Hz. Intensity and amplitude are perceived as how loud a sound is, but they are not the same. Intensity is the amount of energy or power the wave has and is measured in W/m² while amplitude is the change from atmospheric pressure, usually 10⁵ N/m² and is measured in decibels. Decibels are nonlinear scales describing amplitude, with 130db being the threshold of pain. Sound wave's amplitude decreases the farther from the source it gets, eventually having to fade out.  Overall, sound waves are complex things that have so many different features to them including intensity and frequency, making them a very interesting phenomenon.

Amplitude and Frequency Diagram

The What of the Brain

The brain is a complex organ that lets us move, think and be alive. The brain, along with the spinal cord are the central nervous system of the body and control every body regulating process. The brain, although it weighs around 3 lbs, is not a muscle and is mainly made up of fat, along with water, protein, salt and carbohydrates. The brain is made up of 2 groups of matter, gray matter and white matter. Gray matter coats the outside of the brain and is used for processing, while white matter is in the inside of the brain and is mainly used to transmit information, with exceptions. The brain is made up of billions of neurons in both gray and white matter that send electric and chemical signals to communicate. All in all, the brain is highly complex, with many features still beyond understanding.

White and Gray Matter in the Brain

Cerebrum, Cerebellum and Brainstem

The brain has many different sections in it, each to help understand its complex workings. The biggest part of the brain is the cerebrum in the front, with it controlling movement, speech, judgment, emotions, learning, senses and many more things. The gray matter in the cerebrum is called the cerebral cortex and it is split into hemispheres, with them controlling the opposite side of the body. The cerebellum is farther down at the back of the brain, with it also having 2 hemispheres, it controls balance, voluntary muscle movements and posture. The brainstem is at the bottom of the brain going downwards and connects the cerebrum to the spinal cord, it has 3 sections, the midbrain, pons and medulla. The midbrain controls hearing, movement and changing responses. The pons connect the midbrain and medulla, while the medulla regulates necessary and unconscious features (Heart beat, breathing etc.) Overall, the brain has many parts that each play a role in controlling our body and thoughts to help us live.

The Major Sections of the Brain

The Lobes of the Cerebrum

The cerebrum is the most complex section of the brain, and it needed to split even farther into sections called lobes. There are 4 lobes in the cerebrum, the frontal lobe, parietal lobe, temporal lobe and occipital lobe which each have their own functions. The frontal lobe is the largest and is in the front of the head, it creates personality, decision-making, movement and smell recognition. It also had Broca’s area for speech. The parietal lobe is in the middle of the brain and does object identification, spatial relations and interpreting pain and touch, also having Wernicke’s area to understand language. The temporal lobe is on the side of the head and controls short-term memory, speech, musical rhythm and smell recognition. The final lobe, the occipital lobe is in the back of the brain and is responsible for vision. Overall, the cerebrum has special functions for each lobe and they all work together to create the bigger intelligence and movement.

Lobes of the Brain

The Parts of the Brain

There are many parts of the brain, from the thalamus to the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex, all are important to keeping the body functioning. The amygdala is paired in the limbic system, underneath each hemisphere and controls emotions, mainly fear and the reward system. The prefrontal cortex, located in the gray matter at the front of the frontal lobe, controls many complex cognitive behaviors. The thalamus, like the amygdala, is paired under each hemisphere and is part of the diencephalon in the midbrain. The thalamus processes motor and sensory (except smell) input before relaying it to another location, prioritizes activities and  keeps you awake. The basal ganglia is a group of structures that controls voluntary movement by approving signals and sending down motor pathways to the correct muscle or rejecting signals and sending them to other cells to dampen the signal until it is lost. The basal ganglia is also a small part of decision making and gives rewards and motivation, and can cause addiction. Overall, the brain has many small parts, too many to list and some not yet even fully understood with some processing fear while others letting you move.

Brain Diagram

Manipulated Variable:                Sound played

 

Responding Variable:                Speed of completing task, how many correct answers

 

Controlled Variables:                 Articles read (Same set of 6 articles the whole time), instruction sets told (Same set of 6 instructions told        whole time), place of testing (Tested in the same room), items in testing space (Items weren’t moved around), device to work on        (Same computer the whole time)

 

Materials Needed

- Recording device
- Sound playing device
- Timing device
- Device to do reading on
- Many coloured arrows (red, orange, green, light blue, dark blue, purple pink and rainbow)
- Random items
- Small coloured symbols
- A clean room
- A desk

Instructions

1. Gather participants
2. Set up 6 online forms with the reading comprehensions down below
3. Find a quiet room
4. Set up room with arrows  and items for second stage of testing
5. Sit at a table with the first participant with a device set up with the forms, a recording device, a device playing the sound and a timing device
6. Start the sound, recording and timing device and give the participant the article
7. Once they tell you they are done, immediately stop the timer, stop the sound and the recording device
8. Repeat steps 5-7 for the remaining sounds
9. Stand in the room with the participant with a timing device and a device playing the sound
10. Tell them what an intersection is considered, the rules of following arrows and what the item here symbols mean
11. Start the sound
12. Read aloud the instructions, make sure to speak clearly, loudly and slowly to guarantee they hear you, they can ask you to repeat it up to 2 time (Original, repeat, repeat)
13. Once finished start timing device and do not repeat instruction if they tell you they forget, try to sink into the background as not to disturb them
14. Once they have found it stop timing device, sound playing device and recording device
15. Repeat steps 9-14 for remaining sounds
16. Repeat steps 5-15 for the remaining participants
17. Graph, analyze and conclude based on the results

Phase 1

Person 1

Sound                    Article        Time Taken  (Mins)        Correct answers
Silence                           1              5.22                                 9/10
Calm music                   2              6.24                                 9/10
Read-aloud*                   3             14.31                                6/10
Baby shark                    4              5.54                                 10/10
8000 Hz                         5              5.33                                  8/10
40 Hz binaural beats   6              7.07                                  6/10

*A visual observation was made with the person mouthing words as they read

Person 2

Sound                   Article          Time Taken (mins)          Correct Answers
Silence                          1               6.54                                    7/10
Calm music                  3               8.35                                    2/10
Read-aloud                   4               9.03                                    2/10
Baby shark                   5               8.25                                    5/10
8000 Hz                        6               7.57                                    7/10
40 Hz binaural beats  2               8.31                                    6/10

Person 3

Sound                 Article           Time Taken (Mins)             Correct Answers
Silence                         1                 6.21                                     9/10
Calm music                 4                 5.43                                    10/10
Read-aloud                  5                 7.41                                     6/10
Baby shark                   6                9.27                                      5/10
8000 Hz                        2                6.09                                      6/10
40 Hz binaural beats  3                7.13                                      9/10

Person 4

Sound                   Article           Time Taken (Mins)            Correct Answers
Silence                          1                   5.45                                      7/10
Calm music                  5                   5.51                                      6/10
Read-aloud                   6                  7.24                                      5/10
Baby shark                   2                   6.19                                      8/10
8000 Hz                        3                  6.13                                      5/10
40 Hz binaural beats  4                   5.48                                      3/10

Phase 2

Person 1

Sound                         Instruction set                    Time Taken (Mins)
Silence                               3                                          1.03
Calm music                       1                                          2.14
Read-aloud                        2                                       Gave up
Baby shark                         4                                      Gave up
8000 Hz                              5                                         1.55
40 Hz binaural beats        6                                          0.33

Person 2

Sound                         Instruction set                     Time taken (Mins)
Silence                              3                                            0.28
Calm music                      2                                         Gave up
Read-aloud                       4                                         Gave up
Baby shark                        5                                            1.01
8000 Hz                             6                                            1.02
40 Hz binaural beats       1                                        Gave up

Person 3

Sound                         Instruction Set                   Time taken (Mins)
Silence                             3                                             3.45
Calm music                     4                                             0.24
Read-aloud                      5                                          Gave up
Baby shark                      6                                             0.26
8000 Hz                           1                                             1.50
40 Hz binaural beats     2                                             1.55

Person 4

Sound                        Instruction set                      Time taken (Mins)
Silence                              3                                            0.21
Calm music                      5                                            1.12
Read-aloud                       6                                            1.17
Baby shark                       1                                             3.36
8000 Hz                            2                                             0.48
40 Hz binaural beats      4                                             0.19

Phase 1 Graph

Phase 2 Graph

Analysis

The graphs of the different experiment phases tell me many things about the speed and accuracy we can complete tasks with noises. The graph for phase 1 shows that the read-aloud has the worst results with everyone getting under 7 questions right and person 2 even getting 8 wrong. The time it took spiked for everyone and in the phase 2 graph all but person 4 gave up during the read-aloud. Overall the sound with the best performance is complicated, for best accuracy there were mixed results, but silence had the most consistent result with it mostly only being 1 away from the best score in the person. The best sound for speed in phase 1 was also silence, but calm music was also a good sound for speed. In phase 2 the best sound for speed was either silence or calm music, but it depended on the instruction set and person as to the time. In phase 2 it seemed that the sound playing hadn’t altered results. Additionally, the small sample size may have affected the results of both phases, making them less consistent than they would be with more testing. Overall silence and calm music were the best sounds to work to, giving you a fast and effective workspace.

In the end, silence appeared to be the best sound proving my hypothesis wrong. My theory about the calm music soothing people and the low beats helping even more was incorrect and silence became the best sound. This could mean that people associate silence with work and focus, or simply that any sound becomes a distraction. Without any distractions within the silence, it proved to be the best, but if there are other noise distractions then quiet music may be best to drown out those distractions. Also, silence is very hard to achieve with many everyday distractions like phones binging, people talking, going on in the backdrop. To take my project farther I would test with a sort of fake silence, with different distractions around and quiet noises in the background. Overall, if you can attain a truly distractionless place then silence is best for working, but realistically calm or soft music is the best, providing noise covering distractions but not highly distracting in itself.

My science fair project, although done on a small scale, can have big impacts on the world. Schools and workspaces often have lots of distractions and noise, with the average worker getting interrupted every 11 minutes and it taking 23 minutes to regain full focus, decreasing productivity by 40%. My experiment will help optimize school time for learning and lower distractions when working. For example, if you play background music while doing a project, it will drown out small noises and help associate that specific music with focus. Workplaces also have loud or high pitched noises that not only can damage your hearing, but loud noises can interfere with the concentration of workers. When workers are fully immersed in their task, they become 5x more productive than if not getting distracted. Some jobs like surgeons, pilots or accountants require much focus and not being focused could have large consequences. My project could also impact distractions while driving with over 22% of fatal collisions caused by distracted driving. Overall, my project can help improve learning and productivity in two of the most important places to focus by eliminating distracting noises and also keep us safe on the roads.

1. Phase 2 of the experiment had different levels of difficulty in different instruction sets, and were less clear to some people than others. This caused Phase 2 to have very varied results, and for them to be less reliable.

2. For some people I would move around the room to start a camera or to move a distracting object, this may have caused a lapse in focus, making the time longer

3. Sometimes it took a few seconds after the people were done for me to stop the timer, so I removed a few seconds. But with the removed time only being a guess this could make the times a few seconds inaccurate

4. In the test of person 2 there was a distracting object accidentally brought in the space, making them try to move it away or silence it, eventually I moved it to where it was not distracting

5. In some sounds an add would start playing midway through the sound, distracting the people working

6. In Phase 2 I accidentally had false instructions and arrows pointing the wrong direction, causing people to mess up

7. I would sometimes have to speak, mainly in Phase 2 to tell people they could move things, or that they could give up and it may have made focusing hard

8. On some tests I used different recording devices, which may have caused a distracting before the test began, leading to their mind wandering

9. In the tests on person 2, 3 and 4 I told them what the previous persons time was on each sound before they did the sound, which may have made it more competitive and cause people to want to do better

10. The time and day varied for each participant I tested on

11. The small sample size affected the outcome and reliability of results, if larger sample sizes were taken then the positives and negatives would become more consistent giving a definite average
 

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Many people helped me along the way, but my biggest thanks will go to Ms. Burkell for giving me much needed help along the way and giving me the oppporiunity to go to CYSF. I would also like to thank Mrs. Macpherson for always supporting me and believing in me and Mr. Stranzinger for his support and tips. My friends all encouraged me along the way, helping me through the tough workload and letting me do my experiments on. A side thanks to all the people who allowed me to test on them, they are the star of this science fair project. Finally a huge thanks to my parent, they were always there when I needed some tips, or to stop my procrastination. I couldn't have done this project without the help and encouragement of you all.