Trick to boost creativity

To draft a cover letter that’s sure to impress hiring managers for your dream job, you’re better off heading to the library than a coffee shop that plays background music. So say researchers in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology. When volunteers worked on a wordassociation task either in a quiet space or while listening to music, researchers found those who plugged away in a quiet room or in a library with background noise significantly outperformed those in the music group on measures of verbal creativity. The authors say this could be because music disrupts the flow of working memory, but background noise doesn’t affect it as much.