Speaker 1: Welcome to stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb. One moment, please, your call
Speaker 1: is important to us. A representative will be with you shortly. Again,
Speaker 1: one moment, please, your call is important to us. A
Speaker 1: representative will be with you shortly. Oh hey, oh thank god,
Speaker 1: it's me Julie, Julie Tuglas. Sorry, I was stuck in
Speaker 1: the call void the Yeah, I thought we had we
Speaker 1: taken care of that ages ago. But I mean, there's
Speaker 1: nothing more frustrating, really when you're trying to do a
Speaker 1: podcast and your your podcast partner is just it's just
Speaker 1: stuck in that call waiting limbo. Well, if how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works would just shut off that portal into the call
Speaker 1: waiting void, that wouldn't happen, right. I didn't saying we
Speaker 1: need to break that thing up for for years, but
Speaker 1: no one ever does it, so I know, and you
Speaker 1: would think that when we moved into a new space
Speaker 1: they would do that, but apparently not so important. And
Speaker 1: apparently they don't realize that the average Americans spend about
Speaker 1: forty three days of their lives on hold. That's over
Speaker 1: the course of a lifetime, Right, Yeah, it's still depressing.
Speaker 1: It's just very depressing to think of that, because because
Speaker 1: when you're when you're stuck waiting on a call, I mean,
Speaker 1: even if you can sort of um do something semi
Speaker 1: interesting or productive while you're waiting, it's still such a
Speaker 1: wasted time because you're it's not like you're gonna be
Speaker 1: able to do anything well outside of waiting on that call. Right,
Speaker 1: You're still mentally tethered to that call. And I don't know,
Speaker 1: do you think it makes it worse or better when
Speaker 1: call hold music is played? Well, you know, I guess
Speaker 1: prior to this research, I would say that I tended
Speaker 1: to prefer it. You have, only because it allows me
Speaker 1: to They put the phone on speaker phone, set it down,
Speaker 1: and there's that like constant tinkling of of boring waiting
Speaker 1: music in the background, and I know that as long
Speaker 1: as I'm registering that music, I can sort of drift
Speaker 1: away from the phone. I'm not gonna I don't have
Speaker 1: to worry about there's suddenly being a person, because if
Speaker 1: there's suddenly a person on the other line, there's gonna
Speaker 1: be a stark fall off in that music, and then
Speaker 1: there'll be some somebody from some of the country saying hello, Hello,
Speaker 1: I'm here to talk to you. Yeah. And it's true
Speaker 1: because you do kind of feel like you're in the
Speaker 1: void in the first place on the call. So if
Speaker 1: you have some sort of auditory queue that you're still
Speaker 1: there that I haven't to them, yeah, then it makes
Speaker 1: you feel a little bit better. But as we will
Speaker 1: discuss in this episode, the quality of the music, the
Speaker 1: pacing of that could affect how you're actually perceiving the
Speaker 1: passing of time. Yeah. And this is uh, this, this
Speaker 1: is a fascinating topic because at first it may might
Speaker 1: seem just normal on every day, I mean, call music.
Speaker 1: What could be more boring? What could be I mean
Speaker 1: a few things are more boring than call music. But
Speaker 1: when you start looking at you you get into the
Speaker 1: perception of time, altered perceptions. It's it's really a deep
Speaker 1: and fascinating topic. Yeah. And at the bottom of all
Speaker 1: of this, the sort of base stock of this soup
Speaker 1: is memory, and we'll talk more about that. But before
Speaker 1: we go into music and memory, let's just briefly talk
Speaker 1: about the types of time. There are the ways in
Speaker 1: which we try to parse it and deliver it to
Speaker 1: one another. Yeah, we've talked about this in the past.
Speaker 1: We did a whole episode or more on the nature
Speaker 1: of time and the way we perceived time. Believe that
Speaker 1: episode was called Clocking clocking in, uh, and then colon
Speaker 1: in some of it a little bit on there, but
Speaker 1: but yeah, time is is very tricky to nail down,
Speaker 1: and it you kind of have to look at it
Speaker 1: from different to perspectives, sort of like the blind men
Speaker 1: pawing at the elephant to try and figure out exactly
Speaker 1: what this thing is. Because certainly we've talked about cyclical
Speaker 1: time before, the idea that everything is a circle in
Speaker 1: the same way that that the season their cyclical, the
Speaker 1: day and night is cyclical. Uh, that our life is
Speaker 1: rather cyclical. Every morning we get up, we do things,
Speaker 1: we eat, we defecate, we grow older, and then we
Speaker 1: go to sleep. Everything is in a is in a cycle.
Speaker 1: And if you look back at older civilizations, older cultures,
Speaker 1: like that was the way you viewed the universe. Everything
Speaker 1: was in a cycle, our lives were in a cycle,
Speaker 1: and any individual point in our life was only important
Speaker 1: insofar as it carried out a role in that existing circle. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, in that sense, there really is no beginning
Speaker 1: or end to time, right, everything is just sort of
Speaker 1: melding into one another. Now. Linear time, on the other hand,
Speaker 1: is predicated on organized cultural systems like Christian doctrine. For instance.
Speaker 1: In the beginning, right, there's the beginning, there's there's a
Speaker 1: time in which the universe was born. Um, and then
Speaker 1: you know that the end of the world is near
Speaker 1: exactly depending on I guess which version you have, I
Speaker 1: don't know, um. But that is this attempt to try to,
Speaker 1: you know, take these cultural systems and make sense of time.
Speaker 1: And then you have clock time, which pretty much all
Speaker 1: of us are on now. Yeah, And we talked about
Speaker 1: that at length in the episode because clock time is
Speaker 1: weird too, because there was a time when when clock
Speaker 1: time was not in any way universal. And as you try,
Speaker 1: the more we try and make clock time universals, just
Speaker 1: the more complicated it gets, because of course we have
Speaker 1: to have different time zones. Sometimes there are an hour off, sometimes,
Speaker 1: like in Newfoundland, Canada, they're a half hour off, and uh,
Speaker 1: and and how do you attempt to get everything coordinated
Speaker 1: and that when it's a different day on one part
Speaker 1: of the earth in a different day on the other,
Speaker 1: when really everything is existing at the same time. And
Speaker 1: and then if you start looking out that other planets
Speaker 1: and the you know, the idea that will eventually be
Speaker 1: on two planets at once, then how do you start,
Speaker 1: uh keeping time in a way that makes sense for
Speaker 1: that scenario. Oh, yeah, because there's time dilation, which we'll
Speaker 1: get into at a moment that space time. But yeah,
Speaker 1: doesn't matter that there are eighties six thousand, four hundred
Speaker 1: seconds and a day. You know, does that knowledge change
Speaker 1: the way that time passes? Yeah, it kind of just
Speaker 1: creates this weird ruler outside of our experience of time.
Speaker 1: So we we all every day have those have those moments,
Speaker 1: or more than moments, we have great stretches at times
Speaker 1: where our experience of time does not match up at
Speaker 1: all with with with the passage of it, like like
Speaker 1: go with uh being a new father, with with my
Speaker 1: with my son. I've gotten where I can sort of
Speaker 1: gauge how much time has passed by by'll see. It's
Speaker 1: it's a little different now. But for while I was thinking,
Speaker 1: if I if I think fifteen minutes has passed, I
Speaker 1: need to subtract like half of that, or if I
Speaker 1: think it's a half hour's pass they need subtract half
Speaker 1: of that. Um. It's it's a little different now, but
Speaker 1: but yeah, you get into these weird situations where where
Speaker 1: your experience of time and clock time are are are
Speaker 1: often way off. Yeah, your experience and your documented um
Speaker 1: columns really and then but we can't help but to
Speaker 1: put these tents around time and try to describe some
Speaker 1: sort of meaning or system to it. And then just
Speaker 1: to confuse things a little bit more a little bit,
Speaker 1: you have space time, which we've the notion that space
Speaker 1: and time are not separate. This is Einstein. Of course
Speaker 1: they act on each other. You have to consider both
Speaker 1: time and space because your time and my time are
Speaker 1: different depending on how we're moving through it. So just
Speaker 1: like matter can be changed and manipulated, so can space
Speaker 1: and time. And that's where you have time dilation and
Speaker 1: the warping of time because the closer you can travel
Speaker 1: at the speed of light, the more time slows down. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then you get into this crazy idea that is
Speaker 1: that as in time and space are one, and then
Speaker 1: it's like time and space is one big lump of
Speaker 1: Plato where everything that has occurred and will occur it
Speaker 1: is all existing at once in this big solid, just
Speaker 1: unimaginable mass. It's true. So you get this idea that
Speaker 1: this passage of time, it's just not a concrete aspect
Speaker 1: of our existence at all. It is largely received by
Speaker 1: environmental cues, uh not to mention psychological states as dictated
Speaker 1: sometimes by their larger systems in our culture. So then
Speaker 1: you have something like music which brings up this idea.
Speaker 1: Could you have music time m hmm, Well, of course
Speaker 1: time is a is a huge part of music, keeping
Speaker 1: the like we need into tempo and the structure of
Speaker 1: any kind of musical piece. Obviously, it's so mathematical. Music
Speaker 1: has a beginning in an end. And though I would
Speaker 1: do wonder someone out there can tell me this. Has
Speaker 1: there ever been a piece of music specifically composed to
Speaker 1: loop on itself forever? Yeah? Actually, there's something called the
Speaker 1: Buddha Machine, Yeah, and that that uses a set of
Speaker 1: algorithms to create a loop of music over and over again,
Speaker 1: although it's in a different arrangement, so every single time
Speaker 1: that it's played. I used to have one um it
Speaker 1: creates a new arrangement and it creates as it's based
Speaker 1: actually on meditative music that monks play in China. I believe.
Speaker 1: I hope I have all this right, and um, it's
Speaker 1: supposed to be soothing, but I think it's super creepy.
Speaker 1: In fact, I used to play it. I put it
Speaker 1: in someone's office here at house stuff works and just
Speaker 1: keep it on so that when they came in they
Speaker 1: would hear this eerie music. But I'm surprised nobody, especially
Speaker 1: back in like the nineties, when everybody was sort of
Speaker 1: exploring different tricks you could do with the CD format,
Speaker 1: you know, hidden tracks and and you know, having tracks
Speaker 1: on an album and that kind of thing. No one
Speaker 1: to my knowledge ever had an album where at the
Speaker 1: at the very end it kind of reached the same
Speaker 1: point at the beginning. Wherever you have the album on loop,
Speaker 1: uh and on repeat, we just sort of come back
Speaker 1: around at the same place forever. I think that's your thing.
Speaker 1: I think that we are about to get the Robert
Speaker 1: Lamb experience. That's gonna be the name of your first album. Well,
Speaker 1: some people might say that I do just loop back
Speaker 1: on myself, you know, continually, and always come back around
Speaker 1: to the same anecdotes and the same you know. We
Speaker 1: all yeah, I mean time is a circle, right, but
Speaker 1: we're all in our little portable cages of circular time here.
Speaker 1: All right, So let's talk about this idea of music
Speaker 1: and time dilation, or even music and time shrinkage, because
Speaker 1: when you think about it, time is essentially a substrate
Speaker 1: of memory. So we estimate how much time is passing
Speaker 1: based on past experience as well as environmental cues. And
Speaker 1: underlying all of this are neural connections that will react accordingly.
Speaker 1: And these neural connections can be hacked by music. Now, yeah,
Speaker 1: this makes perfect sense because there's so many things that
Speaker 1: affect our perception of time, so many experiences, so many situations.
Speaker 1: I always think of going to a yoga class where
Speaker 1: the first five minutes seemed to take forever because I'm
Speaker 1: anty for it to get started and I'm kind of
Speaker 1: having second thoughts about being there, and then the last portion,
Speaker 1: the last you know, fifteen minutes of yoga, uh, seemed
Speaker 1: to seem to just be a different type of time entirely.
Speaker 1: And music is an experience. It's a sonic experience, it's
Speaker 1: a sonic journe me and UH, and that journey varies
Speaker 1: greatly depending on the on the music, and so our
Speaker 1: mind is engaging in that experience. So for a variety
Speaker 1: of reasons we're going to discuss here. It's going to
Speaker 1: affect the way you perceive time. Yeah, especially when you
Speaker 1: think about your brain being this pattern seeking machine and
Speaker 1: music essentially messing with anticipation what your brain is thinking
Speaker 1: is going to come next, Especially when you think about
Speaker 1: mathematics and music and UM you look at these songs.
Speaker 1: It's just having you know certain arrangements that your brain
Speaker 1: is going, Oh yes, I know. Even if you're not musical,
Speaker 1: you don't know the notes. You are gonna anticipate what
Speaker 1: that next note is going to be because there's only
Speaker 1: so many UM chord progressions that exist out there, so
Speaker 1: we probably have heard all of them by now, and
Speaker 1: you have some sort of memory of what that potential
Speaker 1: chord could be. Yeah. I often think about this when
Speaker 1: I'm listening to music, because you wonder at what point
Speaker 1: do we run out of songs? You know, mathematics UM
Speaker 1: has the pristance. I haven't been listening to the new
Speaker 1: Tycho album. I love Tycho, wonderful musician. Some of the
Speaker 1: new songs on the new album are wonderful, but I
Speaker 1: was kind of like thinking, it kind of sounds like
Speaker 1: he's playing all the notes between the notes on a
Speaker 1: previous song. You know, like we're just sort of gradually
Speaker 1: filling in um like a rectangle of space, until we
Speaker 1: we have we have creatively filled every possibility. But but
Speaker 1: but in a way that ends up playing on your
Speaker 1: experience of the music because you are you're anticipating the differences.
Speaker 1: You know, well, you know what's interesting about that is
Speaker 1: you talk about the space between the notes, that's the time, right,
Speaker 1: that's that time dilation. And if you look at classic beatles,
Speaker 1: if you look at Miles Davis, who created modal jazz,
Speaker 1: created an entirely different way to experience the jazz notes,
Speaker 1: blues chords, UM, you will see that those artists are
Speaker 1: messing with time constructs and music and that maybe why
Speaker 1: they they um continue to to really intrigue us and
Speaker 1: persist in music history. Now, I think everyone has had
Speaker 1: this experience. You you hear a new song and it's fantastic.
Speaker 1: You you just love it, so you just start listening
Speaker 1: to it over and over again, even though there's a
Speaker 1: there's there's this voice in the back of your head
Speaker 1: telling you don't do it, don't keep If you keep
Speaker 1: listening to this song, you're gonna if you're not gonna
Speaker 1: get it's not you might get sick of it, but
Speaker 1: you also just might completely dull your appreciation of it.
Speaker 1: It will become so familiar that will have no power
Speaker 1: on you whatsoever. You could even become dull um. There's
Speaker 1: a possibility of that. But if you really like that
Speaker 1: piece of music, if it really has created this neural pathway,
Speaker 1: you might come back to it. But for music, maybe
Speaker 1: that doesn't grab your attention that much and you hear
Speaker 1: over and over again. Or if there's just sort of
Speaker 1: like these trite um constructions of music that you don't appreciate,
Speaker 1: and again, all this is so subject. Try to get
Speaker 1: an exam for you, though, of something that's sort of trite,
Speaker 1: like dull music from the beginning, not something you lost
Speaker 1: interest in, but just something the first time you heard
Speaker 1: it you bored you to tears. I guess in a way,
Speaker 1: it's it's almost hard to note these songs because they're
Speaker 1: they're so outside of our our appreciation that they they're
Speaker 1: almost invisible. That's hard to say, because um uh, by
Speaker 1: and large, I choose songs that I listened to that
Speaker 1: I really like. So everything that I listened to every
Speaker 1: day is usually pretty much hand picked because I put
Speaker 1: together all these playlists based on moods and days and
Speaker 1: all that kind of stuff. Okay, how about something that's
Speaker 1: thrust upon us, like say Silent Night. It's silent night
Speaker 1: of boring song. I would tend to argue, it's kind
Speaker 1: of boring beautiful. See, that's where I get subjective and
Speaker 1: well and now, and this is where memory comes into play,
Speaker 1: because that's a song that I used to sing in
Speaker 1: Spanish in school and it was like this great moment
Speaker 1: that I used to get up with my class and
Speaker 1: sing it and it felt really beautiful, and maybe just
Speaker 1: singing in Spanish it's more beautiful than in English. What
Speaker 1: about you lay it on adults song? Well, I think
Speaker 1: definitely Silent Night comes to mind. And there are various
Speaker 1: hymns that I remember growing up with. I feel like, Okay.
Speaker 1: John Wesley is the founder of Methodism, and he had
Speaker 1: a brother who wrote a whole bunch of church hymns,
Speaker 1: and I swear my memory is that he wrote some
Speaker 1: of the dravest, dullest hymns ever composed. Like stuff is
Speaker 1: just just just complete, uh, Like it's it's the the
Speaker 1: musical equivalent of like raw tofu, you know, and you
Speaker 1: just you just said there singing and you're like, why
Speaker 1: did you why was this written? What? Why? Why would
Speaker 1: you worship a god that this music is about? You know,
Speaker 1: you felt like it didn't actually even reflect the beauty
Speaker 1: of the human experience because I mean, I I grew
Speaker 1: up with church hym so some church hymns, I mean
Speaker 1: I think, are you know, have a have something really
Speaker 1: going for him? You know, they really jibe with you,
Speaker 1: and they have spirit and energy to them, and when
Speaker 1: everyone sings them together, you have this communal experience with
Speaker 1: the music. But some of that Wesley stuff just really
Speaker 1: was draft. So your neurons weren't firing, you weren't sinking
Speaker 1: up there with the rest of your community and getting
Speaker 1: really into exactly yeah. Um. So one of the things
Speaker 1: that stands out to me in terms of that is
Speaker 1: something that could be a repetitive piece of music. And
Speaker 1: I think about Paul McCartney simply having a wonderful Christmas time,
Speaker 1: which I hate, sorry to say, and I think because
Speaker 1: it's so repetitive, and cognitive scientists Daniel Levitton points out
Speaker 1: that too much confirmation when something happens exactly as it
Speaker 1: did before, causes us to get bored and tune out.
Speaker 1: And he says little variations keep us alert as well
Speaker 1: as serving to draw attention to musical moments that are
Speaker 1: critical to the narrative. And remember we talked about storytelling
Speaker 1: beings such a huge part of the human experience and
Speaker 1: narrative and song being just an extension of that. Okay,
Speaker 1: So it's like American Pie for instance. They're like a
Speaker 1: million verses to American Pie. And if you were to
Speaker 1: if Don mc lean were to sing each verse the
Speaker 1: same same speed, with no no, no, no modulation, no changes, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it would get really boring really quickly. But and then
Speaker 1: you could argue again subjectively, that American Pie does get
Speaker 1: really boring real quickly, but Don McClane does sing each
Speaker 1: each verse kind of has a different energy to it
Speaker 1: and and and stresses different parts of the of the lyrics. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, in a way your brain has to be
Speaker 1: violated in order to be interested. Yeah, at least the
Speaker 1: first time, the first time you kind of get hooked
Speaker 1: into a song. And Leviton says that that this is
Speaker 1: seen in a song like the Beatles I Want You
Speaker 1: and She's So Heavy, He says that that's sort of
Speaker 1: a typical rock song at some point where you sort
Speaker 1: of think, okay, it's repetitive, it slows down, and then
Speaker 1: it gets fast again, and you think it's going to
Speaker 1: end by fading out in a classical way, but no
Speaker 1: gradual fade, right. Yeah, they think your brain is thinking that,
Speaker 1: but no, it just stops in the middle of a
Speaker 1: chord and your brain kind of goes, WHOA. I like that.
Speaker 1: I wasn't anticipating that, and I had been up Yeah
Speaker 1: it does if and actually listened to it again this
Speaker 1: morning just to make sure that that was my memory
Speaker 1: of it as well, and it does have a very
Speaker 1: sort of lulling, repetitive motion to it. But but then
Speaker 1: it just sort of jammed you at the end. It
Speaker 1: makes you sit up and take notice. Huh. Now is
Speaker 1: it the type of stop? I think I mentioned this before.
Speaker 1: If I'm listening to music on my iPhone and and
Speaker 1: there's that distinctive abrupt kind of almost not it's not
Speaker 1: an abrupt stop, but kind of a quick dive when
Speaker 1: a call comes in and you're trying and you're listening
Speaker 1: to a song, and that always like gives me this
Speaker 1: lump of anxiety because I'm like, who's calling me? What
Speaker 1: kind of what am I being called about? Is it's
Speaker 1: something bad? We'll talk about this more later, But that's
Speaker 1: because probably because you're your prefrontal cortex and all this,
Speaker 1: there are eleven different parts of your brain that are
Speaker 1: they're absorbing and responding to music, by the way, but
Speaker 1: that's just one of them that is probably jarred out
Speaker 1: of this sort of again being lulled into this certain state.
Speaker 1: And by the way, when you listen to a song
Speaker 1: that you find particularly pleasurable or it's is a novel
Speaker 1: song and intrigues you in a different way, you're going
Speaker 1: to get a release of dopamine. And here's the crazy thing.
Speaker 1: If you like that song and the next time you're
Speaker 1: just thinking about that song or just a couple of
Speaker 1: the notes begin to play, your memory is going to
Speaker 1: resurrect that feeling of pleasure and dopamine is going to
Speaker 1: start flowing again. So again you can start to see
Speaker 1: where these neural pathways are starting to make u their
Speaker 1: self known to your brain and memory is kind of
Speaker 1: hooking up with it. And to just retouch on the
Speaker 1: whole mind body connection thing, you kind of have to
Speaker 1: think about this. When you're talking about dopamine being released
Speaker 1: and all this again, it's not you're not even just
Speaker 1: listening to music with your ears. You're not even just
Speaker 1: listening to music with your brain. Your body listens to music.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, and we know that your heart rate
Speaker 1: will sync up to the music, um that you'll begin
Speaker 1: to respond to a full body experience. All right, let's
Speaker 1: take a quick break, and when we get back, we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about how music can actually be gamed for
Speaker 1: the retail experience. And we all have heard music over
Speaker 1: the loudspeaker and when you're at grocery store elsewhere, So
Speaker 1: let's find out what's going on when we get back.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back, we're grocery shopping. We're thinking about
Speaker 1: the study called the effects of music and in a
Speaker 1: retail setting on real and perceived shopping times. And we
Speaker 1: find out that subjects report that when they are shopping
Speaker 1: and they're listening to music that seems familiar to them,
Speaker 1: that they think that they have been lingering longer then
Speaker 1: they actually have been. In fact, it's the music that's
Speaker 1: unfamiliar to them that causes them to linger longer. That
Speaker 1: is seems kind of complicated. Well it seems you know, counterintuitive, right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So like if I go into a store and they're
Speaker 1: playing my favorite song, how does that affect my perception
Speaker 1: of my time in that store? Okay, so you could
Speaker 1: say that your prefrontal cortex again, that's trying to anticipate things.
Speaker 1: It's encountering something familiar and it knows what's going on next.
Speaker 1: Then time begins to dilate. It seems longer, right because
Speaker 1: you already know what's going on in the background. But
Speaker 1: if you have a new piece of music, then you're preferm.
Speaker 1: The cortex cannot anticipate what's about to happen next, and
Speaker 1: it kind of throws a little you know, Mike, you'rerench
Speaker 1: into the whole thing, and your brain gets distracted and
Speaker 1: you're not keeping time in the way that you normally would.
Speaker 1: You can't anticipate things. It kind of comes back to
Speaker 1: I've thrown this out before, the old myth of the
Speaker 1: vampire and some variations of it. You leave like a
Speaker 1: some sort of intricate knot out or some sort of
Speaker 1: like a piece of woven fabric out of the vampire,
Speaker 1: and the vampire will pick this up and the vampire
Speaker 1: is so obsessed with it, untying the nod or figuring
Speaker 1: out the pattern, that he or she will forget that
Speaker 1: the sun is going to come up and then will
Speaker 1: burn up when when when Donn arrives. And our minds
Speaker 1: are kind of like that. We've talked about this before.
Speaker 1: You throw us an incomplete conversation. You throw us any
Speaker 1: kind of riddle, something where there is a pattern to perceive,
Speaker 1: and and it will capture us. And and and if
Speaker 1: you're in a store and the music is composing a
Speaker 1: riddle to you, your mind even in the background, can help.
Speaker 1: But go after that riddle. Go after try and understand it,
Speaker 1: try to anticipate it and figure out its patterns. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, unless you're a zen master, you're probably not
Speaker 1: paying attention to all the different auditory cues and the
Speaker 1: visual cues in front of you. So you gotta let
Speaker 1: this stuff play in the background and let your unconscious
Speaker 1: deal with it. But what happens is that you are,
Speaker 1: you know, changing your choices, changing your behavior as a result,
Speaker 1: not radically, but nonetheless you're changing your behavior. And one
Speaker 1: example of this is music and alcohol consumption. Oh, you're
Speaker 1: of course talking about that. Nice quiet music that they
Speaker 1: play in bars, right, I don't know, I don't even
Speaker 1: think they play that anymore. No, it's but but but no,
Speaker 1: it's it's always loud. You go into a bar and
Speaker 1: and it's been a while since i've I've I've gone
Speaker 1: to a bar, But it's always this really loud environment
Speaker 1: and you're having to shout at the top of your
Speaker 1: lungs to talk to the person right next to you.
Speaker 1: And it's it's frustrating. Yeah, it's but and and at
Speaker 1: times I'm thinking this place is broken. Why don't they
Speaker 1: turn the music down so we can all have a
Speaker 1: conversation here. But they know that's not going to sell drinks. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they know that for every decibel above deciples, they're going
Speaker 1: to get you to buy more drinks, possibly even more food.
Speaker 1: Turns out that above deciples can actually reduce your mental
Speaker 1: and physical reaction times by and once you get up
Speaker 1: around twenty decibles, you find that the sales go up
Speaker 1: of alcohol. Now, there are a couple of different reasons
Speaker 1: that we'll get into in a moment, but I also
Speaker 1: wanted to talk again back into this whole idea about
Speaker 1: in store music and how it affects us. There was
Speaker 1: an interesting study by the Journal of Applied Psychology in
Speaker 1: which researchers played an alternate days stereotypical French or German
Speaker 1: music in a UK store selling wines. And what did
Speaker 1: they find. They found that the German music days more
Speaker 1: German wine was sold. The French music days more French
Speaker 1: wine was sold. So again, here's this music playing on
Speaker 1: your unconscious and playing on your decisions. And it's kind
Speaker 1: of like if you when you go into a place
Speaker 1: that sells fancy things and they're playing classical music or
Speaker 1: some sort of cultured music, and you're you're there and
Speaker 1: you're thinking, I am about to purchase things that are
Speaker 1: classy or or or or ritzy, or you go into uh,
Speaker 1: some sort of you know, hip clothing, so are obviously
Speaker 1: they're gonna play hip young music, and therefore our brain
Speaker 1: can help me make that association. Well, you know in
Speaker 1: terms of the classical thing. I mean, you just hit
Speaker 1: right on it. Because there's just a study that looks
Speaker 1: at restaurants that play classical music. These are upscale restaurants,
Speaker 1: and they found that people are playing into that narrative
Speaker 1: I'm at a classy place with music that's beautiful and
Speaker 1: and uh and I'm my highest human self with tons
Speaker 1: of money. Sure, one more dessert? Why not? I mean
Speaker 1: they found that people actually spent more money when they
Speaker 1: listened to that classical music in those restaurants. So at heart,
Speaker 1: if you're somewhere where someone is trying to sell you
Speaker 1: something and there is music playing, that music is is
Speaker 1: like a dagger stabbing you right in your willpower, right
Speaker 1: in your your ability to control your consumption, to allow
Speaker 1: common sense to enter into your purchasing decision. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it's it is interesting how people, really retailers, really pay
Speaker 1: attention to music and how it affects you. I don't
Speaker 1: think all of them are that successful in it. No,
Speaker 1: And then I'm sure there are some people, especially independent retails,
Speaker 1: who were just like, oh, we got have some music playing,
Speaker 1: let's just put something on. And and there may be
Speaker 1: getting into the whole willpower stabbing thing by accident, but
Speaker 1: that's the reality exactly. Now. Nicholas go again. He is
Speaker 1: a professor of behavioral sciences. He conducted a studying on
Speaker 1: music and alcohol consumption. He said that there are two
Speaker 1: hypotheses for that behavior at the bar where there is
Speaker 1: a hundred twenty decibels or more of music pounding your ears.
Speaker 1: He says that the first hypothesis is that, in agreement
Speaker 1: with previous research on music, food, and drink, high sound
Speaker 1: levels may cause higher arousal. So if you think about
Speaker 1: it this way, the subjects are drinking faster and ordering
Speaker 1: more drinks because their motor cortex, uh in their visual
Speaker 1: cortex could be over stimulated. So we've talked about this
Speaker 1: in terms of sinking up our our movements, um, and
Speaker 1: how music sometimes feels like it's actually compelling us to move. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean you have like a really hopping bar, and
Speaker 1: you're gonna have what loud, upbeat music. You're gonna have
Speaker 1: lower light levels, but also light sometimes kind of interesting lights.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's even like Christmas lights or just the light, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, glistening on all the bottles. You're gonna have
Speaker 1: people moving around, so yeah, you're gonna have this heightened
Speaker 1: state of arousal. And so that it makes sense that
Speaker 1: that would that would factor into increased consumption of beverages
Speaker 1: and or cheesy fries. Yeah, because everything feels like faster, right,
Speaker 1: Like I gotta get this cheesy fries on my throat
Speaker 1: now because the music is telling me to Um. This
Speaker 1: second hypothesis is that it may have a negative social
Speaker 1: effect on your social interaction, right, because you can't hear
Speaker 1: each other. So the social surrogate is just to drink
Speaker 1: more because I mean, there's just a lack of space
Speaker 1: between conversations, right, so you fill that with more drinking. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I definitely remember that from from college. But
Speaker 1: part of that was I couldn't get aybody to talk
Speaker 1: to me anyway, um, because I don't believe it. No, well,
Speaker 1: I was. I'm not saying I if I had gone
Speaker 1: to the right place, I'm sure people would have talked
Speaker 1: to me. For some reason, I had this crazy idea
Speaker 1: that I needed to go to this like horrible college
Speaker 1: bar on the strip and try to meet people. And
Speaker 1: it was a terrible idea. You got to get the
Speaker 1: biker bars, man, that would have been a great idea.
Speaker 1: I would have told you that back then, that I
Speaker 1: should have got got to do a coffee shop or something.
Speaker 1: But anyway, that's that's the heart of it. Though I
Speaker 1: do remember there being a comfort and walking around with
Speaker 1: a drink because if I suddenly feel awkward for not
Speaker 1: talking with anyone, for being on my own. Well, then
Speaker 1: this is the drink, this is what I'm doing. I
Speaker 1: can simply drink this. And I've heard people who who
Speaker 1: currently or having the past smoke cigarettes say the same
Speaker 1: thing about that, that if there's a you know, this
Speaker 1: sort of social anxiety of what am I doing here?
Speaker 1: What should I be doing? The cigarette is an instant task,
Speaker 1: not only in something you can do with your hands
Speaker 1: as well in your mouth. And it's like, of course
Speaker 1: I'm not talking to somebody, I'm drinking this drink, I'm
Speaker 1: smoking this cigarette, etcetera. Isn't it funny that we have
Speaker 1: to come up with these little stories and we're not
Speaker 1: even communicating them verbally to someone. We just have to
Speaker 1: take out a cigarette and and try to say in
Speaker 1: a way I'm doing something really, yeah, you're you're you know,
Speaker 1: filling out that scene in the the the linear experience
Speaker 1: of time in that book, that is your life. Indeed,
Speaker 1: so this idea of losing ourselves in music, the zen
Speaker 1: of the prefrontal cortex, that's that's really the story here,
Speaker 1: because if you look at these periods of intense perceptual engagement,
Speaker 1: like being enraptured by music activity in the prefrontal cortex,
Speaker 1: which generally focuses on introspection, will shut down. And this
Speaker 1: was seen in research by Raphael Maloch and Ellen Goldberg
Speaker 1: of the Wiseman Institute of Science. They designed this experiment
Speaker 1: that have participants looking at images and listening to music
Speaker 1: while undergoing f m R I and they found the
Speaker 1: activity in the self related prefrontal cortex with silence during
Speaker 1: intense sensory process. So in a cent you're shutting down
Speaker 1: the default mode network with some very calming music. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this works for both familiar music and unfamiliar music, right,
Speaker 1: because in the case of familiary music, you your prefrontal
Speaker 1: cortex really needs to rely more on the other parts
Speaker 1: of the brain for perception, for sensory perception, to try
Speaker 1: to figure out what it is. So your prefrontal cortex,
Speaker 1: the eye, the me, the the seat of judgment kind
Speaker 1: of gets quiet. And if you are listening to familiar
Speaker 1: music that's pleasurable to you, well, then you're just getting
Speaker 1: caught up in that that sort of zen like moment
Speaker 1: of anticipating what's coming next in a pleasurable way. You
Speaker 1: are dipping into that stream of memory, and memory I
Speaker 1: think is just at the at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: it's something that's hypnotizing. Yeah. So we've talked about the
Speaker 1: power of music that we know, music that has not
Speaker 1: become dull and uh and ordinary for us, but but
Speaker 1: is a is a journey that we can anticipate all
Speaker 1: the little curves in the road. We've talked about how
Speaker 1: new music is super engaging. So I can't help but
Speaker 1: think about the power of both remixes and covers, as
Speaker 1: well as the use of known songs in a well
Speaker 1: crafted DJ mix, because then you get that that interesting
Speaker 1: blend of of the familiar with with these new changes,
Speaker 1: like what part of the song are they going to use,
Speaker 1: how are they going to adjust the tempo, what new
Speaker 1: spin are they putting on this particular cover of the song?
Speaker 1: You know? Yeah, Actually, Um, there's a tribute album to
Speaker 1: Nick Drake that I was listening to and I can't
Speaker 1: remember that ortis who recorded Pink Moon, but it's beautiful
Speaker 1: And I never thought that I would ever say, like, oh,
Speaker 1: the Nick Drake original, it's can't be outdone, but it
Speaker 1: may have been. And yet those centers of pleasure because
Speaker 1: they're drawing on memory. Yeah, um, also memory that's connected
Speaker 1: to whatever happened the first time I, you know, listen
Speaker 1: to that song. They're all engaged, and then you get
Speaker 1: the like, oh, I wonder how this phrasing is going
Speaker 1: to work out. It's not how I anticipated. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: were talking talking about the way that music alters our
Speaker 1: perception of time. It is crazy when you listen to
Speaker 1: a song that you haven't listened to in a very
Speaker 1: long time, and there really is this sense of time
Speaker 1: travel into the past because suddenly you're you're almost physically
Speaker 1: there again. Um. I think of a few different songs.
Speaker 1: I think they were tory Amos songs that I listened
Speaker 1: to a lot in college and then I just kind
Speaker 1: of like really overdated on listening to tor Amos for
Speaker 1: long and then just stopped forever. But occasionally I'll hear
Speaker 1: one of those songs again, and it's kind of this
Speaker 1: uncanny feeling because suddenly I'm I'm kind of in my
Speaker 1: old skin again and this old and like the ghost
Speaker 1: of an old mindset, and it's, uh, it's it's almost
Speaker 1: it's it's really kind of haunting, right. And then if
Speaker 1: you think about your brain actually, like you know, the
Speaker 1: chemical changes in your brain that are occurring, right then
Speaker 1: if that song is changing that moment for you in
Speaker 1: your perception of time. Yeah. So, given everything that we've
Speaker 1: talked about here, the way that songs can alter our
Speaker 1: perception of time, that they can make us travel into
Speaker 1: past experiences. Uh. Is there any music that is dangerous
Speaker 1: to listen to? Yes? According to the Royal A Mobile
Speaker 1: Club Foundation for Motoring in two thousand and four, they
Speaker 1: deemed Wagner's A Ride of the Valkyrie also known as
Speaker 1: Snoopy in My House Snoopy song, Um, that being the
Speaker 1: most dangerous music to listen to while driving. I can
Speaker 1: see that, yeah, because it's got a very driving feel
Speaker 1: to it. I hear it, I instantly think of the
Speaker 1: helicopters swooping in an apocalypse. Now do do do that one? Right?
Speaker 1: But this is the thing they say that it's not
Speaker 1: so much the distraction of the song, but the substitution
Speaker 1: of the frenzied tempo of the music that challenges driver's
Speaker 1: normal sense of speed and the objective que of the
Speaker 1: spedometer and causes them to speed, which makes me think,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe there are a couple of songs that
Speaker 1: I drive too fast. In fact, I know that I
Speaker 1: don't well what are they? Because I have a couple
Speaker 1: as well. I don't know if I really want to
Speaker 1: admit it, but um, I kind of pops I love it, okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: and you're familiar with that. I don't think I am.
Speaker 1: I kind of pop is the name of the group,
Speaker 1: I guess, and the songs. I love it. It's just
Speaker 1: a really like techno rockets kind of You can play
Speaker 1: it really loud and just feel like you're speeding through
Speaker 1: time and space. In fact, I listened to it a
Speaker 1: lot when I'm working out, Um, what do you drive like?
Speaker 1: A HELLI in too Well. I don't listen to these
Speaker 1: either these tracks much in the car anymore, but I
Speaker 1: do specifically remember driving too Fast because I was listening
Speaker 1: to either the theme song from Conan the Barbarian, which
Speaker 1: has a you know, bump bump bum bum bum bum bump,
Speaker 1: very driving kind of theme to it, and then also
Speaker 1: Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song, which definitely has a very driving
Speaker 1: uh you know kind of oh yeah it does, and
Speaker 1: sense of mention just makes my would make my my
Speaker 1: my foot just go down on the gas right. Because
Speaker 1: again visual and more motor cortex are all getting into this,
Speaker 1: and you do get this sense of movement. And another
Speaker 1: one is White Stripes seven Nation. You got to be
Speaker 1: careful with that one. I can imagine that that's that's
Speaker 1: a great track and definitely has that driving feel to it. So, yes,
Speaker 1: there can be dangerous music in a sense, because again,
Speaker 1: music is a is a full body experience, so in
Speaker 1: a sense, it's it's kind of like a drug, and
Speaker 1: you've got to be careful how you mix a drug
Speaker 1: and your experience of the physical world. You know, this
Speaker 1: just reminds me to you of this little factoid that
Speaker 1: during the Korean War, Um, they would the Americans would
Speaker 1: take out speakers and blast doors day music because apparently
Speaker 1: that was so jarring because it's so um it's so
Speaker 1: like anti you know, munitions coming at you, kind of
Speaker 1: music like fly Me to the Moon, so odd and
Speaker 1: so out of place that it would actually calm enemy fire. Interesting.
Speaker 1: I never you can thought about the possibility of weaponized
Speaker 1: doors day tracks, right, I know we've the opposite, We've
Speaker 1: heard of things that would Yeah, but there you go.
Speaker 1: There's non dangerous music as well. Um. I would love
Speaker 1: to hear from you guys out there what your dangerous
Speaker 1: song is. Yeah, what's your dangerous song, what's your most
Speaker 1: calming song? What song bores you to death? Anything we
Speaker 1: touched on here, we'd love to hear your personal feedback
Speaker 1: on it. Where can you find? As well as always,
Speaker 1: you can go stuff to blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: That's the mothership. That's where you will find our blog post,
Speaker 1: every podcast episode we've ever done, video projects that we're
Speaker 1: up to, as well as links out to our various
Speaker 1: social media accounts like our Facebook, our Twitter, are Tumbler,
Speaker 1: our Google Plus. You can find a link to our
Speaker 1: SoundCloud page. Is that's your preferred method of streaming your audio.
Speaker 1: You can find links to our YouTube page. That's mind
Speaker 1: Stuff Show. If you want to continue to support our
Speaker 1: video products, be sure to follow us there um every follower,
Speaker 1: every of you helps and uh of course there is
Speaker 1: a more old fashioned way if you want to interact
Speaker 1: with us. I like to think of as an intimate
Speaker 1: away to collect your thoughts and then put them together.
Speaker 1: However you'd like haiku, just normal senses, whatever, you can
Speaker 1: send them to blow the mind at discovery dot com
Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics. Because
Speaker 1: it how stuff works dot com