Music
Like great weed, music alters our sense of time
by Mark Teo
February 4, 2014
It’s a fact long-known to the Dorito-obsessed set: Music and weed are great companions, and when you get lost in a great song, time can speed up, slow down, and otherwise bend time in mysterious ways.
As it turns out, it’s not just the pairing of illicit substances and song that bends time—music can do it on its own. And the sensation of “losing yourself” in, say, a Weedeater song, isn’t fiction: Neuroscientists say that music can create an “alternate temporal universe” inside our minds, says Nautilus. When you get intensely into a song, your pre-frontal cortex (the part of the brain that, according to Wisegeek, is responsible for abstract thinking and thought analysis) can switch off.
In their words: “Rather than enabling perceptual awareness, the role of the self-related prefrontal cortex is reflective, evaluating the significance of the music to the self. However, during intense moments, when time seems to stop, or rather, not exist at all, a selfless, Zen-like state can occur.”
Translation: When music arrests (or “hijacks,” as the study says) the brain, time feels suspended.
Of course, this shouldn’t be a surprise, writes Jonathan Berger, who penned the Nautilus story. Depending on how engaged our memory and attention are, time can compress or decompress—the reason why time flies when you’re having fun, or when, on long roadtrips, time can slow down to an agonizing crawl. Music can do the same. (Ever sat through a terrible band?)
More interestingly, though, Berger’s findings also say that music’s time-altering properties can be used for less-than-honest reasons: Bars that play low-tempo music supposedly sell more drinks, because they create an environment that makes people want to linger. Grocery stores, too, have employed slow music to keep people browsing their aisles. And familiar music makes people feel at home, and will keep people in stores longer (this, perhaps, is the reason that so many stores play pop radio as opposed to their own playlists).
So, in an effort to keep you reading this post for as long as possible, we’ll just leave a slow and familiar song here. Here’s “Strawberry Fields Forever,” slowed down by 800 per cent.
