Your taste in
music could offer an insight into the way your brain works, according to
researchers from Cambridge University. Their study, found that mellow music
like R&B, soft rock and folk was the choice of participants who scored
highly for empathy, while those who were good at ‘systemising’, or analysing
patterns, preferred punk, heavy metal and more complex music like avant-garde
jazz. The researchers recruited 4,000 participants and put them through a
series of different tests to assess whether they were ‘empathisers’ or
‘systemisers’, for example by asking them if they were interested in how car
engines are constructed, or if they were good at guessing how people were
feeling.
They then asked
the participants to rate 50 short pieces of music in 26 different styles, and
discovered that empathisers tended to prefer mellow R&B and soft rock and
‘unpretentious’ music like country and folk, with songs like Jeff Buckley’s
‘Hallelujah’ and Norah Jones’ ‘Come Away With Me’ among the favourites. Those
who scored high on empathy also preferred negative emotions or emotional depth
in the lyrics. The systemisers favoured ‘intense’ music, but disliked mellow
and unpretentious styles, with their top tracks including like ‘Enter Sandman’
by Metallica. Their cognitive style can be a better predictor of what music
they like than their personality.
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