Classical music may do more than sound beautiful—it could heal the mind.
People use this music to ‘purge’ their negativity.
People use this music to ‘purge’ their negativity.
Liking heavy metal music is a sign of high intelligence, research suggests.
Some people may use heavy metal music as a way of coping with being talented.
Being a ‘metalhead’ is sometimes associated with poor performance and delinquency, but this survey found otherwise.
More intelligent people may find themselves outsiders and use heavy metal music to deal with the stress.
Dr Stuart Cadwallader, the study’s author, says there is a stereotype that more intelligent people are into classical music.
While this is true for some, others take solace in heavy metal.
Dr Cadwallader said that young people enjoy the complex and sometimes political themes in metal that are not explored in mainstream pop music.
Both alienation and being separate from society may chime with some gifted people.
The results come from a survey of 1,057 members of the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth in the UK.
This body represents young people aged 11-18 who are in the top 5 per cent academically.
The results showed that while rock was the most popular genre among talented youngsters, one-third rated heavy metal in their top five genres and 6 per cent gave it top spot.
Those who particularly liked heavy metal also tended to have lower self-esteem.
Genres traditionally linked to intelligence — classical music and jazz — were the least popular.
Some young people said they liked to literally ‘jump out’ their frustrations and anger to heavy metal.
Dr Cadwallader said:
“Perhaps the pressures associated with being gifted and talented can be temporarily forgotten with the aid of music.
As one student suggests, perhaps gifted people may experience more pressure than their peers and they use the music to purge this negativity.”
The study was published by the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth (Cadwaller, 2007).
“Where words leave off, music begins.” ― Heinrich Heine
“Where words leave off, music begins.” ― Heinrich Heine
Beautiful but sad music can help improve mood when people are feeling blue, research finds.
For the study 220 people recalled something depressing that had happened to them.
They then recalled what type of music they had listened to afterwards.
Choosing beautiful but sad music emerged as the only strategy that people thought had cheered them up.
Dr Annemieke van den Tol, the study’s first author, explained the results:
”We found in our research that people’s music choice is linked to the individual’s own expectations for listening to music and its effects on them.
The results showed that if an individual has intended to achieve mood enhancement through listening to ‘sad’ music, this was in fact often achieved by first thinking about their situation or being distracted, rather than directly through listening to the music chosen.
Indeed, where respondents indicated they had chosen music with the intention of triggering memories, this had a negative impact on creating a better mood.
The only selection strategy that was found to directly predict mood enhancement was where the music was perceived by the listener to have high aesthetic value.”
The study was published in the journal Psychology of Music (Van den Tol & Edwards, 2014).
Sad songs on repeat? You’re not alone. Find out why millions are addicted to sorrowful melodies.
When listening to music or speech, our brains do much more than just track what people are currently saying or the notes being played right now.
Six fascinating studies exploring how music impacts sleep, study habits, emotions, exercise performance, and stress relief.
A mind monitoring system that could ‘nudge’ people towards brain boosting activities.
A 15 second clip was enough to reveal aspects of personality.
A 15 second clip was enough to reveal aspects of personality.
People who like more sophisticated music, like opera and jazz are higher in openness to experience, research finds.
People who are open to experience are more likely to be imaginative, sensitive to their feelings, intellectually curious and seekers of variety.
Openness to experience, one of the five major facets of personality, is also linked to higher intelligence.
The study also found that those who like music that is unpretentious, relaxing and acoustic, like folk and country, tend to be more extraverted.
Extraverts are outgoing and energetic.
The final personality trait linked to musical taste was agreeableness.
Agreeable people tended to like all types of music more.
The study based its findings on putting music into one of five categories:
Only the ‘sophisticated’ and ‘unpretentious’ types were related to personality, the researchers found.
Liking contemporary, intense or mellow music, therefore, does not tell us anything in particular about your personality.
The conclusions come from a survey of 22,252 people who were played unfamiliar clips of music just 15 seconds long and asked to rate them.
These were then compared with tests of the five personality factors: openness to experience, neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness.
The study’s authors write that…
“…people who have a need for creative and intellectual stimulation prefer unconventional and complex musical styles, and that people who are sociable and enthusiastic prefer musical styles that are energetic and lively.”
The authors conclude:
“These results corroborate that music – a form of self-expression that is ubiquitous across human cultures – communicates meaningful information about basic psychological characteristics.”
The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Nave et al., 2018).
With age it is natural for the brain’s plasticity to reduce and there is also a loss of gray matter as it shrinks in size — but the process can be slowed.
An earworm is a song that is stuck going around in your head and there are scientifically proven ways to get rid of earworms.
An earworm is a song that is stuck going around in your head and there are scientifically proven ways to get rid of earworms.
An earworm, sometimes known as a brainworm, is a song going around in your head that you can’t get rid of.
Some claim that earworms are like a cognitive itch, we scratch them by repeating the tune over and over in our heads.
Having a song going around and around in your head is a very common occurrence.
Almost everyone reports having experienced an earworm.
While some say an earworm is not a problem, others find earworms disturbing, distracting and even an obstacle to thinking.
One study asked 103 participants aged 15-57 all about their earworm experiences (Beaman & Williams, 2010).
Here’s what they found:
Searching for earworms on Twitter reveals people have all kinds of songs stuck in their heads.
From The Muppets theme tune, The Sound of Music tracks, to Richard Strauss’ An Alpine Symphony.
Similarly, this study revealed relatively little overlap between the songs going around in people’s heads.
This suggests that it’s more the song’s interaction with people rather than the song alone that creates the cognitive itch.
Not everyone was equally undisturbed by earworms though, the study’s authors write:
“Those who found the earworms most problematic were respondents who considered music particularly important.
These participants also reported experiencing earworm episodes of longer duration and harder to control than participants for whom music was of less importance.”
Participants reported using all sorts of techniques for trying to get rid of earworms like listening to other songs and doing some work (two even reported drinking alcohol) but generally fighting the earworm just made it stronger.
The reason for this is that, as psychologists have found, thought suppression can be counter-productive.
One method for getting rid of earworms that has psychological research to back it up is chewing gum (Beaman et al., 2015).
For the research, some people were asked not to think about a song by David Guetta featuring Flo Rida and Akon called “Play Hard”.
Should you be unfamiliar with this life-changing masterpiece, here it is:
(People weren’t forced to watch the video as well — psychologists have some ethical standards you know.)
Sometimes participants chewed gum while trying not to think about the earworm song, other times they just sat there.
In the three minutes people just sitting there thought about the song around 10 times.
Those chewing gum thought about the song around 7 times.
Not bad seeing as they had just listened to the song and some had been told not to think about it — a method usually guaranteed to make you think of nothing else.
The study’s authors explain the phenomenon this way:
“…co-opting the articulatory motor programme to chew the gum impairs the involuntary recollection of an auditory image.
This is consistent with data showing that chewing gum can affect immediate memory for verbal material.”
Earworms are not all bad, though.
In fact, earworms help to strengthen memories when they first form (Kubit & Janata, 2021).
Indeed, earworms have a strong link to another oft-experienced effect of music: to bring a beautiful memory back to you.
Professor Petr Janata, study co-author, said:
“Scientists have known for some time that music evokes autobiographical memories, and that those are among the emotional experiences with music that people cherish most.
What hasn’t been understood to date is how those memories form in the first place and how they become so durable, such that just hearing a bit of a song can trigger vivid remembering.”
For the study, people were asked to watch videos while they listened to music they had not heard before.
Afterwards they tried to recall as much as they could from the video clips.
The results showed that when the song got stuck in people’s heads, creating an earworm, they also remembered more details from the video clip.
The more the song became an earworm, the more details they recalled.
In addition, when people listened to the tune again, their memory for the video was near perfect.
Earworms are more than just an irritation, said Dr Benjamin Kubit, the study’s first author, said:
“We typically think of earworms as random nuisance beyond our control, but our results show that earworms are a naturally occurring memory process that helps preserve recent experiences in long-term memory.”
For most of us earworms are relatively untroubling.
And if you are tempted to moan then just be thankful you’re not the 21-year-old described in a case report by Praharaj et al., (2009).
This man had had music from Hindi films going around in his head against his will for between 2 and 45 minutes at a time, up to 35 times a day, for five years.
Unfortunately, even powerful drugs couldn’t stop the music.
So I don’t want to hear any complaints about “We Will Rock You” or “Whomp – There It Is”.
.
Join the free PsyBlog mailing list. No spam, ever.
