What can be big or small but carry the same punch? If it was left up to me I would have said ‘two ill-matched boxers’. It turns out the correct response is, ‘headphones’. I guess there could be other correct answers to this question, but I’ll go with ‘headphones’. Because I happen to have owned more than one pair of them myself, of varying size, and I agree that if they had their way, they would have punched holes in my tympanum given half a chance.

There’s a desire to ‘turn the volume up’ and risk grievous bodily harm when a good tune is playing. I’m not sure if this action is linked to a desire to share the music with others because what makes us feel good, we reason, must surely make others feel good, too. (Which as we know from experience is often not the case.)

Additionally, the music that’s pounding in our ears via the headphones is not the same ‘on the outside’ to the person sitting beside. What emanates, again as we know, is a tinny residual sound which, to put it bluntly, is more of a nuisance than a shared experience.

So anyway, headphones are all the rage for the present. Oldies and youngsters can be seen — on the streets, on trains and buses — cut off from the world, inhabiting their own private music space and enjoying the experience, too. Fair enough. But it is indeed interesting to see teenagers — those paragons of multi-tasking — trying to do two things at one time: Listen to music and swat for an exam.

In my reckoning, sometimes two actions or two tasks are so incompatible as to be impossible to do together. Studying and music-listening fall under that category, for me. I say this because it’s a theory that I’ve already tried and tested. It worked, only partially. That is, the music won. It gave me such a wonderful time while I was trying to study that I ended up studying nothing at all for a said exam and had to waffle my way through an entire semester of tests.

Music always wins when it’s in a contest with a classroom text book. Yet, I observe youngsters today, earphones firmly affixed in earholes, tinny echoes of what they are listening to escaping nevertheless into the open domain, with their eyes fixed on the page of a book in the lap.

I recently rode a bus terminus-to-terminus with one such youngster who, for the entire duration of the trip must have listened to at least 12 different songs, but never turned the page once, such was the force of his concentration – on the music, of course. I, in fact, got to read more off the page in his book and can still remember that it had to do with the difference between tea tree oil and tea seed oil. Which is something I had no idea about: The first mentioned is an essential oil obtained from the melaleuca tree; whereas, tea seed oil is an edible, pale amber-green extract pressed from the Camellia.

My own son, when he was a teenager, once proclaimed that his concentration deserted him if he didn’t have the music turned on in the background.

Of course, when his grades deserted him, too, he saw sense and, the following term, opted for music-less study and ended up doing marginally better.

So, as I theorised earlier, there are some sets of tasks that cannot be done satisfactorily side-by-side. You cannot be sleepy, for example, and want to read a novel at the same time. Sleep will win the day. You cannot run a marathon and savour a hot cup of coffee – I’m not sure which one will win in that case. And as the great Albert Einstein pointed out, maybe from experience, “Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.”

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.