A study on the degree of disturbance by sound under mental tasks using electroencephalogram

The purpose of this study was to obtain data on the influence of sounds on disturbance and on electroencephalogram (EEG) results. The following experiments were conducted: The EEGs for ten subjects under mental tasks were measured with or without test sounds. After conducting measurements, the subjects were asked to evaluate the self-rated degree of disturbance they experienced on their tasks. In this experiment, four patterns of a 1000 Hz pure tone were presented to the subjects as test sounds, and a simple calculation task was also given as a mental task. From these experiments, we found that the patterns of test sounds had an actual influence on their self-rated degrees of disturbance, and disturbance by the test sounds were also related to the patterns. From these results, we tentatively theorize that, when the potential of Fm (i.e., frontal midline theta rhythm) becomes small, the self-rated degree of disturbance becomes large. Thus, it was suggested that the self-rated degree of disturbance was strongly associated with the loss of concentration on the task.