x.com/not_ellington/status/2090119497055105524

The post makes a universal claim: that music will absolutely make thinking worse. Controlled research does not support that as a blanket rule.

Two examples directly contradict it:

1. Ritter & Ferguson (2017, PLOS ONE) experimentally compared several music conditions with silence in 155 participants. Their abstract reports that "Creativity was higher for participants who listened to 'happy music' ... while performing the divergent creativity task, than for participants who performed the task in silence." In other words, for at least one kind of thinking task (divergent/creative thinking), music improved performance rather than degrading it.

2. Bottiroli et al. (2014, Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience) tested background music during memory and processing-speed tasks. Their abstract states that "Overall, background music tended to improve performance over no music and white noise" and the paper title summarizes the main result as processing speed improves with upbeat music, while memory seems to benefit from both upbeat and downbeat music.

These studies do not prove that music always helps thinking. But they are enough to show that the post's absolute statement is false: the effect of music on cognition depends on the task, the kind of music, and the setting. Some studies find impairment, some find no effect, and some find benefits. So it is inaccurate to say music will absolutely degrade a person's thinking process.