ADHD and Music: Why Background Beats May Boost Study Focus

 Summary: A new study explored whether young adults with ADHD are more likely to listen to background music during daily tasks. The survey, involving over 400 participants, found that individuals with ADHD prefer listening to music—especially stimulating music—while studying or playing sports.

This contrasts with neurotypical individuals, who tend to listen to music more passively, such as when relaxing. The findings suggest that music may help people with ADHD achieve optimal arousal levels for focus, opening new avenues for non-pharmacological support.

Key Facts:

• Study Behavior: Young adults with ADHD are more likely to listen to background music while studying and playing sports.
• Stimulating Sounds: Individuals with ADHD prefer energizing music over relaxing tunes, possibly to boost cognitive performance.
• Potential Support Tool: Music

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Why Can’t We Remember Being Babies?

Most of us can’t recall our earliest years, a phenomenon known as infantile amnesia. A recent study published in Science offers fresh insights into why these memories elude us, suggesting that babies do form memories, but accessing them later in life is the challenge. Researchers at Yale University, led by cognitive psychologist Nick Turk-Browne, used functional MRI (fMRI) to scan the brains of 26 infants aged 4 to 24 months. The infants were shown unique images, and their hippocampal activity—a brain region critical for memory—was monitored. When shown the images again alongside new ones, babies with higher hippocampal activity during the initial exposure spent more time looking at the familiar images, indicating memory formation. This effect was stronger in infants over 12 months, pointing to a developmental trajectory in memory encoding.

Historically, infantile amnesia was attributed to an underdeveloped hippocampus, but this study challenges that view, showing that even young infants can encode episodic memories—specific recollections of events. So, why don’t these memories persist? Turk-Browne suggests they may still exist in the brain but become inaccessible due to a mismatch between how memories are stored in infancy and how we retrieve them as adults. Factors like rapid neuron growth in early childhood, which disrupts memory circuits, or the shift from crawling to walking, which alters how experiences are contextualized, may contribute. Supporting this, a 2023 Science Advances study on mice showed that early memories could be reactivated in adulthood by stimulating specific neurons, hinting that human memories might also persist but remain locked away.

Ongoing research, including Turk-Browne’s work with home videos from a baby’s perspective, suggests these memories may linger until around age six before fading. Cultural factors also play a role: studies show that children in cultures with rich oral traditions, like New Zealand Māori, recall earlier memories, possibly due to frequent reminiscing with caregivers. While the mystery of infantile amnesia isn’t fully solved, these findings highlight that our earliest experiences shape us, even if we can’t consciously revisit them.