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And Finally Artist News
Listening to AC/DC makes you bad at board games (and surgery)
By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 15 December 2016
If you’re the competitive type of guy who can’t bear the thought of losing the family board game showdown on Christmas Day, it might be an idea to remove AC/DC’s ‘Mistress For Christmas’ from your festive playlists. A study has found that listening to rock music makes men worse at board games, with the Australian band particularly singled out for reducing cognitive skills.
The study, published in the Medical Journal Of Australia this week, was carried out by researchers from Imperial College London and the Royal College Of Music. They asked 352 attendees of this year’s Imperial Festival to play a game of Operation. Each was given headphones, which played either ‘Andante’ from ‘Sonata For Two Pianos’ by Mozart, ‘Thunderstruck’ by AC/DC, or the sound of a real operating theatre.
The study found that while women were apparently unaffected by any type of music or sound played to them, men who listened to AC/DC were slower and made more mistakes. And while this might all seem a little frivolous, it’s actually part of a wider and more serious investigation.
“Although this study is clearly tongue-in-cheek, and was all performed in our spare time, it is part of our wider research into the effect of music on performance”, explained lead researcher Dr Daisy Fancourt. “Particularly in a medical setting such as an operating theatre”.
Yeah, if you’re going in for an actual operation, and if the surgeon’s a man, maybe make sure he’s not planning to play any AC/DC during the procedure, just to be on the safe side. Fancourt says that music is played in operating theatres around 72% of the time, though there is a lack of agreement among experts on the benefits (or lack thereof) of this.
She continued: “One of our areas of research is how we can boost performance in many different settings – from rowing in the Olympics, to a musical performance or delivering an important speech. This study suggests that for men who are operating or playing a board game, rock music may be a bad idea”.
Asked for his view on all of this, former AC/DC drummer Phil Rudd said: “Now I know why I always lose at Scrabble”.
