“Does listening to music stimulate creative thinking or stifle it?” asks the author of this recent article in Time. As it turns out, it might depend on what kind of thinking you’re doing—divergent or convergent.

Divergent Thinking

According to the authors of “Background Music Stints Creativity,” published in Applied Cognitive Psychology, divergent thinking is “a strategy whereby multiple creative ideas are produced and appraised within a short period of time in order to generate potential solutions for a given problem.”

Think: brainstorming. Coming up with a lot of different ideas.

Convergent Thinking

Convergent thinking, on the other hand, is about “the connection of different ideas to determine a single, correct solution to a problem.”

Think: decision-making. Hunting through the haystack of ideas to select the single best one.

 So when does music help?

If you’re trying to come up with a lot of creative ideas, music can stimulate your divergent thinking.

A 2017 study in the journal PLOS ONE found that listening to “happy” music—defined as classical tunes that were upbeat and stimulating—helped people perform better on tasks that involved “divergent” thinking…“We can only speculate why happy music stimulates divergent thinking,” says Simone Ritter, coauthor of the PLOS ONE study and an assistant professor at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. One theory put forward in her study is that the stimulating nature of lively music somehow energizes the brain in ways that promote a “flexible thinking style,” which leads to unconventional or innovative ideas.

Time

But if you’re trying to find the one right answer, you might want to take off your headphones.

In the study that led to “Background Music Stints Creativity,” the researchers used a test called the Compound Remote Associates Test. It’s the kind of test that has right answers and wrong answers, thus measuring convergent thinking. They had subjects listen to different kinds of background music while taking the test, and found that all types of music “significantly impaired CRAT performance in comparison with quiet background conditions.”

Their finding jibes with my experience, but I can’t relate to the study about happy music and divergent thinking. If you blared happy music at me while I was trying to think, I’d only be able to come up with ideas about how to smash your speakers.