Hi, this is Ray.

I want to start with an experiment I ran on myself a couple of years ago that produced results I didn't expect. I had written a newsletter for this series about lo-fi beats and studying… covering the general research on background music, the Yerkes-Dodson connection, and how instrumental music can support focus. All of that research was solid. But something kept nagging at me. I'd noticed that on days when I was feeling productive already, lo-fi seemed to help me focus. On days when I was already scattered, it didn't help much. Which raised a question I hadn't quite addressed in my previous piece: was lo-fi actually helping my brain, or was I just associating it with productivity because I put it on when I intended to be productive?

So I ran a small experiment. For two weeks, I randomly assigned each of my study sessions to either "lo-fi" or "silence" conditions using a coin flip. I tracked my subjective sense of focus during each session, my objective output (pages read, problems solved, code written), and my sense of whether the session had been effective. I expected to see clear evidence that lo-fi helped… that's what I'd been telling people in the previous newsletter.

What I actually found was more interesting. My subjective sense of focus was noticeably better in the lo-fi sessions. I felt more focused. I felt more in the zone. I felt more like I was doing serious work. But my objective output was almost identical between conditions. Same pages read. Same problems solved. Same quality of work when I reviewed it later. The lo-fi wasn't making me learn more or better. It was making me FEEL like I was learning more or better. And I had been unable to distinguish between these two things until I actually measured them.

This experience sent me back into the research more carefully. What I found was that this dissociation (between what we feel about our performance and what we actually accomplish) shows up all over the placebo literature. And it has genuinely important implications for how learners should think about their study tools, their routines, and the entire ecosystem of things they use to feel productive. Today's newsletter is about that. What the research actually shows about placebo effects on cognitive performance, why belief about your study tools matters in specific ways that are different from how you might assume, and how to think about lo-fi (and other productivity tools) honestly. Let's get into it.

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Let me start with what the science actually shows, because it's more nuanced than either "placebos don't work" or "placebos are magic."

According to a 2019 study on cognitive neuroenhancement, manipulation of performance expectation affects the perceived change in performance and tiredness, but not the actual cognitive performance in healthy adults. This may explain why college students use such drugs despite their little impact on actual cognitive functioning. Read that carefully. When researchers told healthy adults they were getting a cognitive-enhancing drug (that was actually placebo), the participants FELT more alert and reported feeling more capable. But their actual measured performance on cognitive tasks didn't improve. This is the specific pattern I saw in my own lo-fi experiment. Belief affects the experience. Belief doesn't necessarily affect the outcome.

A separate study specifically tested whether tones associated with cognitive performance could produce placebo effects. According to the researchers, we found no effects of expectation on objective measures, but a strong effect on subjective perception, i.e., although actual performance was not affected by expectancy, participants strongly believed that the placebo tone frequency improved their performance. Even more directly relevant to the lo-fi question. Tones that participants believed enhanced performance didn't actually enhance performance, but participants believed they did. This is closer to what's happening with lo-fi than most people realize.

But here's where the research gets more interesting and complicated. According to research on sleep and performance, participants were led to believe they had slept longer and more soundly than they actually had. This belief alone was enough to improve their performance on tasks involving reasoning, language, and mathematics. Their brains were no more rested in physiological terms, but the expectation of being well rested changed how effectively they used their cognitive resources. In this specific case, belief did affect actual performance. Participants who thought they'd slept well performed better on cognitive tasks than participants who thought they'd slept poorly, even when actual sleep was the same. Belief mattered for performance here.

So which is it? Do placebos affect cognitive performance or not? The honest answer is: it depends on what specifically you're measuring, what specifically the belief is about, and what mechanisms are actually in play. Simple placebo-tone effects on immediate cognitive tasks: mostly just subjective. Belief about resource states (like whether you're rested) affecting how you use your cognitive resources: real effects on performance. The picture isn't clean. Anyone telling you it's completely one way or the other is oversimplifying.

Let me try to be honest about what the research suggests about lo-fi and similar study tools.

The direct cognitive effect is probably small. The research on background music and cognitive performance generally shows small effects that depend heavily on the specific task, the specific music, and the specific person. Lo-fi doesn't appear to have some special power that other quiet, non-lyrical background music doesn't have. When researchers actually measure cognitive outcomes (reaction time, memory, comprehension), differences between lo-fi and other conditions are usually smaller than differences between individuals.

The subjective effect is probably real. People consistently report feeling more focused when they use lo-fi than when they don't. This isn't nothing. Subjective experience matters. Feeling focused makes the study session more pleasant, more sustainable, and more likely to happen at all. Even if lo-fi isn't directly changing your cognitive performance, it might be changing your relationship with studying in ways that produce real learning outcomes through indirect paths.

The environmental and behavioral effects are real. When you put on lo-fi, you're often doing something else at the same time: sitting down to work, opening your materials, closing distracting tabs, adopting a study posture. The lo-fi becomes associated with all these other behaviors. Over time, the music becomes a cue that triggers the whole cluster of study behaviors. This isn't the music affecting your cognition directly… it's the music affecting your behavior, which affects your cognition. Still a real effect. Just working through a different mechanism than most people assume.

The masking effect is real. In noisy environments, lo-fi provides consistent background sound that masks more disruptive irregular noises. This effect isn't placebo… it's genuine acoustic masking. If you'd otherwise be interrupted by traffic sounds, conversations, or other unpredictable noise, lo-fi provides a steady acoustic environment that supports focus. This is one of the genuine benefits that isn't just belief.

The mood effect is real. Music affects mood, and mood affects learning. If lo-fi puts you in a slightly better mood than silence would, that mood improvement supports learning through the emotional-encoding mechanisms I've covered in previous newsletters. Not because the music is directly making you smarter. Because your mood is better, and better mood supports learning.

Here's the framework I've arrived at after actually looking at the research and running my own small experiment.

Lo-fi doesn't have some special cognitive-enhancing property. What it has is a specific bundle of features that work through multiple mechanisms:

Some of these are placebo. Some are real cognitive effects. Some are behavioral effects. Some are environmental effects. The overall benefit is real, but it's distributed across many mechanisms rather than being about the music itself doing something magical to your brain.

This matters for how you should think about it. If you believe lo-fi is transforming your cognition, you're probably overestimating its direct effect. If you dismiss it as pure placebo, you're missing the real behavioral, environmental, and mood effects it produces. The truth is in between, and it's still useful even without being magic.

Let me push back on the framing that "just placebo" means "not real."

Behavior is real. If believing lo-fi helps you focus produces the behavior of actually sitting down and studying, that behavior is real, and the learning that results from it is real. The mechanism doesn't matter as much as the outcome. In Naruto terms, whether your chakra is real or just what you believe, the fights you win using it are still won.

Sustained practice is real. If believing your study tools work makes you more likely to sustain your study practice, the sustained practice produces real learning. The consistency I've covered in previous newsletters produces the compounding that makes learning happen. Whatever supports the consistency is doing real work.

Reduced friction is real. If lo-fi reduces the friction of starting a study session (makes you more willing to sit down, more able to transition into work mode), that friction reduction has real effects on how much learning you do. The learner who studies daily because their tools support the habit outperforms the learner who doesn't study because starting feels too hard.

Improved subjective experience is worth something. Even if lo-fi didn't affect performance at all, the fact that it makes studying feel better is worth something. Studying that feels pleasant is more sustainable than studying that feels grim. Sustainability is the whole game for long-term learning.

So the "just placebo" dismissal misses several ways in which the belief actually matters, even if the direct cognitive effect is smaller than users typically believe.

Okay, the practical part. Based on the honest research picture, here's what I'd suggest.

Use whatever tools support your practice. If lo-fi helps you sit down and focus, use it. The mechanism doesn't matter as much as the outcome. You're not required to know exactly how it's working to benefit from it. The learner who uses their tools effectively produces more learning than the learner who overthinks whether the tools are "really" working.

Don't attribute your learning to the tool. This is the specific error to watch for. If you have a productive study session with lo-fi playing, don't conclude that the lo-fi produced the learning. You produced the learning. The lo-fi was part of the environment. Attributing your work to your tools tends to produce dependence on the tools and reduced sense of your own agency.

Test whether the tool matters. If you're curious whether a specific study tool is actually helping, you can do what I did… track your objective output across sessions with and without the tool. Most people who do this discover that their objective output is more similar across conditions than their subjective experience suggests. This isn't a reason to abandon the tool. It's a reason to have accurate expectations about what it's doing.

Watch for tool dependence. Some learners become genuinely unable to study without their specific tools. This is a warning sign. The tool has become part of the study behavior rather than a supplement to it, and when the tool isn't available, learning stops. Occasionally studying without your usual tools maintains your ability to work in varied conditions, which matters because life doesn't always provide ideal conditions.

Combine with actually effective techniques. Whatever background support you use, remember that the actual work of learning happens through the techniques I've covered in previous newsletters… active recall, spaced repetition, elaboration, retrieval practice, deep processing. The music isn't a substitute for these techniques. It's environmental support that might make executing the techniques slightly more sustainable.

Vary your conditions periodically. As I covered in the context-dependent memory newsletter, some variety in study conditions produces more robust memory than always studying in the same conditions. Sometimes with lo-fi, sometimes in silence, sometimes in a different environment entirely. The variety builds memory that isn't overly tied to any specific set of conditions.

Some honest caveats.

This isn't dismissing music entirely. Music genuinely affects cognition through multiple mechanisms. The finding that lo-fi's direct effect is smaller than users believe doesn't mean music has no effect. It means the effect is distributed across mechanisms and shouldn't be attributed to the music itself doing something magical.

This isn't discouraging using tools. Whatever helps you sustain your practice is valuable, even if the exact mechanism is different from what you thought. The practical question is whether you're learning effectively, not whether your tools work through the specific mechanism you assumed.

This isn't universal. Some people may genuinely have larger direct cognitive effects from specific music than others. Individual variation is real. My experiment on myself doesn't necessarily generalize to your specific brain. Your experience matters as data alongside the research.

Placebo effects aren't unlimited. Belief can affect subjective experience, behavior, and some aspects of performance. It can't overcome fundamental cognitive limits or make you learn things you haven't actually engaged with. The tools support the work. They don't replace it.

Here's what I want you to take from all this. The productivity ecosystem is full of tools whose direct effects are smaller than users believe and whose indirect effects are more important than most people realize. Lo-fi is one example. But this pattern applies to many other tools… specific apps, specific rituals, specific setups. The tools aren't doing quite what users assume, but they might still be helpful through mechanisms that are different from the assumed ones.

If you've been using lo-fi and wondering whether it's "really" helping, please consider that the honest answer is: probably not in the specific way you think. But probably in some real way anyway. The behavioral, environmental, and mood mechanisms are doing work even when the direct cognitive mechanism isn't. Your practice is what matters. Whatever supports your practice is doing something real, whether or not it matches the story you tell about it.

The specific practical move I'd suggest: use whatever helps you actually do the work, but don't build up excessive belief in any particular tool's magic. The magic isn't in the tool. The magic is in your consistent practice. The tool is scaffolding that supports the practice. Good scaffolding is valuable. It's not the building itself.

In Death Stranding, Sam's equipment mattered… the ladders, the ropes, the exoskeletons all helped him complete deliveries. But the deliveries weren't the equipment. Sam was doing the delivering. The equipment supported the work. Your study tools work the same way. The tools support what you're doing. What you're doing is what produces the learning. Don't confuse the scaffolding with the building.

Keep learning (and use whatever tools support your practice),

Ray