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by saurik 295 days ago
This was actually studied at some point (at least 15-20 decades ago, as I remember learning about this in college): they gave the same programming problem to a bunch of developers and had some listen to music while they did the task while others worked in silence. There was no real difference between how long it took to do the task between the same group... but the people who listened to music were much much less likely to realize that the entire task was a red herring and the code reduced down to return 0;.