Hendler's lab, had 15 healthy volunteers listen to spooky Hitchcock-style music, and then neutral sounds with no musical melody. Yulia Lerner, a post-doctoral fellow at Prof. Using a functional MRI (fMRI), we can see that distinct changes in the brain are more pronounced when a person's eyes are not being used.'ĭr. Our new findings, however, suggest that the effect is not only subjective. 'It can easily take one's subjective personal experience and manipulate it. 'Music is a relatively abstract emotional carrier,' says Prof. Listening to sounds with our eyes closed seems to wire together a direct connection to the regions of our brains that process emotions, says Prof. And the converse of the scary music effect may be true: happy music could produce a joyous effect when our eyes are shut as well. The experience of scary music becomes more emotionally and physically intense. Hendler's research suggests that, when our eyes are closed, a region in our brain called the amygdala is fired up. Her research was just published in PLoS One and builds on her 2007 study published in Cerebral Cortex.

This finding may have therapeutic value in treating people with brain disorders. Hendler found that the simple act of voluntarily closing one's eyes - instead of listening to music and sounds in the dark - can elicit more intense physical responses in the brain itself.

Scary music and sounds