Singers and guitar heroes alike have always employed what you might call the Celine Dion effect – closing your eyes to heighten the emotional impact of music.
Now, neuroscientists have discovered that a brain centre involved in sensing emotion and fear called the amygdala kicks into action when volunteers listen to scary music with eyes closed.
Spooky sounds
To uncover any neural basis for this effect, Hendler's team scanned the brains of 15 volunteers while they listened to film scores – "kind of Hitchcock-like movies," she says – and less emotive keyboard tunes with their eyes open or shut.
Hear a scary clip here and a neutral one here.
Sure enough, volunteers rated the eerie-sounding music – laced with staccato strings, ominous trombones, and weird effects – as more emotional than the "elevator music"-like keyboard tunes.
Under the gaze of a functional-MRI scanner, horror film scores elicited significantly more amygdala activity in the brains of volunteers who kept their eyes shut, compared to when they kept eyes open. Participants' brains responded no differently to the neutral music whether their eyes were closed or open.
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