Today, the brain sells. Take an old idea, put “neuro” in front of it and you have an apparently exciting new product. In a world that already offers a Neurobliss drink , No-Lie-MRI brain scanning, and Neuroleadership courses, it’s not really surprising that the Focus@will app has appeared, claiming it can boost your attention span by up to 400% using “neuroscience based music”.

Before I tell you why I’m skeptical, here’s how the company claims its instrumental music will help you “study more efficiently and work smarter”. The app's premise is that it usually takes us time to focus because of the distracting effect of the environment. Their music has apparently been carefully engineered to reduce this distracting effect. The tunes go through “phase sequences” to ensure that they are neither too relaxing, nor too distracting. There’s a handy graph that shows how the music keeps you in this sweet spot between focus and daydreaming. “It works in the background,” they explain, “by subtly soothing the part of your brain, the limbic system, that is always on the lookout for danger, food, sex or shiny things.”

Here's why I’m sceptical:

The claims that Focus@will makes on its website are very specific. We’re told that attention span is boosted by up to 400% and that “trials show typical 12-15% positive increase in focus biomarker.” However, if you go to the “science” page of their website, there are no references to any trials. If you click on the “literature” tab, you’ll find a wide assortment of scientific references, some decades old, others more recent. Crucially, not one of them is a trial for the benefits of the Focus@will app.

The company says that its product has been developed in partnership with “leading neuroscientist” Dr Evian Gordon (“30 years experience and 250 plus peer-reviewed scientific publications”), and “internationally recognised expert” psychology professor Dr. Stephen Sideroff. This kind of flagrant appeal to authority is often used as a marketing device. I performed a Google Scholar search for Dr Gordon’s name and the word “music.” This triggered 5 leads, none of them directly relevant to the claims of Focus@will. I did the same for Dr Sideroff. The only remotely relevant lead here was to a 2013 article (pdf) he’d published in the “Annals of Psychotherapy and Integrative Health” about the use of drumming to “facilitate self awareness of authenticity as well as self-trust during the psychotherapy process …”. Also on the scientific advisory board are psychiatrist and TV regular Dr Edward Hallowell and Dr Hal Myers - again, no relevant scholarly articles on music and attention by them either. I'm not attacking the scientific credentials of these men, rather I'm pointing out that they don't appear to have published research that backs the claims made by the app.

We know from past research that different kinds of work benefit from different states of mind. But the Focus@will app is a one-trick pony - it claims to play music with the sole purpose of keeping you at a certain level of habituation to your environment. Let’s explore briefly why this is inadequate. If, say, you are a teacher about to embark on some essay marking, it’s likely that your main challenge is to stay alert to occasional errors in the text. If you go several pages without seeing an error, it can be tricky to maintain vigilance. This is a very different scenario from, say, a creative writer sitting at her desk hoping for inspiration for the next plot twist. The teacher needs to focus and sustain her attention like a spotlight; the writer to open her mind wide to new ideas. The Focus@will app does not appear to recognise this distinction. If the app is effective at all, it seems likely it would help the teacher, but not the writer.

Let’s zoom in on the kind of work that requires sustained focus over time, where the app has the best chance of helping. There are two main psychological theories for why we struggle to maintain our focus, especially in cases where we need to remain vigilant for unpredictable events, such as when proof reading. The first theory states that we lose focus because of diminishing arousal levels. This theory is most promising for the claims of Focus@will - after all, they seem be saying that their music keeps changing just enough so that it ensures you remain in a sufficiently aroused (i.e focused) state. However, unfortunately for them, the arousal theory has been challenged and lost support, not least because studies have shown that maintaining vigilance is stressful (i.e. arousing), and also people’s performance during vigilance tasks is often unrelated to their arousal levels. The second theory for why we struggle to maintain focus is arguably better supported by research findings - this states that we lose focus over time because our attentional resources become depleted, and as other demands compete for these limited attentional resources. This means that if you are in a depleted attentional state, it is actually possible that the ever-changing “phase sequenced” music of the Focus@will app will increase your distraction, undermining your focus. You may have experienced this situation with your own music. Faced with a particularly complicated piece of work, you find that you need to turn off all your music and other distractions, so that you can focus all your powers of concentration on the problem.

Now let’s dig deeper into this idea that background music could actually harm, rather than boost your focus. It has been known since at least the 70s that music can increase workers’ productivity, especially when that work is fairly monotonous and requires little mental effort. However, things get a lot more complicated when it comes to work that requires linguistic or numerical thought. In this case music can have a distracting effect, undermining performance. Consider a study published in 2001 that found music had an adverse effect on students’ writing fluency on a computer. Crucially this detriment was found regardless of whether the music had lyrics or (like the Focus@will app) was purely instrumental. “A student's best bet,” the researchers said, “would be to word process their work in silence, or at least try to reduce background sounds.” Other research has shown that background music, including instrumental music, disrupts short-term memory performance.

There really are so many factors at play when it comes to the influence of music on mental performance - the liveliness of the music, the mood it induces, its familiarity (bear in mind, these characteristics are all partly subjective), whether it is liked or not, and even your own personality type and preferences. For instance, while a 2007 study found that all types of background music had an adverse effect on participants’ mental performance, introverts were more adversely effect than extraverts by high arousal music. Other research shows how music tempo can affect our reading rate (of course, whether we want to read fast or slow might vary according to what we’re doing). Bear in mind that the Focus@will app does not know your personality type, what work you’re doing, how tired you are, or what kind of music you enjoy (other than allowing you to select the basic instrumental genre). Speaking to TechHive last year, the CEO of Focus@will app said that his product purposefully uses music that you won’t be familiar with. “We have found that listening to existing music you like or love is distracting because it’s designed to move you,” he said. I wonder if he knows of a paper published in 2012 that found non-preferred background music was more distracting to reading comprehension than reading in silence?

The effects of music on mental performance are complicated. It would be fantastic if there were a music app that could boost your attention span by 400%, but I don’t believe such an app currently exists. To work, this fantasy app would at least need to know your current energy levels, mood, personality, musical training and preferences, and the specific nature of the project that you’re working on. The Focus@will app has little to none of this complexity. Moreover, its website makes numerous unsubstantiated scientific claims. These are complemented by multiple gratuitous references to the brain and confused references to psychological theory. I won’t be subscribing.