system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: What's going on in the brain when you "turn down the music to see better"?
gpt
Reducing cognitive load. It's not so much that you need to see better, like the way glasses bring things into focus, but you are scanning the environment for clues and processing those clues. It's one of the more demanding cognitive tasks you can do. Your brain knows that any other distractions are just going to divert resources away from your primary task.