I criticized Rose’s book because I argued that (1) many principles of the mind do apply pretty well across the board-everyone’s attention is limited, for example and (2) psychologists are generally aware of the problem Rose identifies. The cockpit will be a good fit for a few, but will be too big or too small for most. To use Rose’s example, if you measure a large group of airplane pilots and find their average height is 69 inches, and then design airplane cockpits assuming “pilots are 69 inches tall,” well, you’ll be disappointed. That doesn’t mean it is a good representative of every data point. Now I didn’t care much for this book, because I thought Rose took a valid concern and ran much too far with it, but here it’s applicable.Īn average is meant as a summary that gives you a sense of the central tendency of a distribution. This is a point of interpretation around which Todd Rose framed his book, The End of Average. In response, several folks on twitter commented as much to say “ok, so we should tell kids not read with music on.” The article concluded that that background noise, speech, and music all have small but reliable negative impacts on reading comprehension. Students and educators are keenly interested in this issue, because some students like to read with music on in the background and some educators wonder whether that affects comprehension. It’s an issue of broad concern, as many of us read at work in noisy office environments, and when we read for pleasure we may be on a subway, at a playground, and so on. On September 15 I tweeted about a new meta-analysis that examines the impact of auditory distraction on reading.

Listening to music while reading