music science

Earlier in the year, we reported on Italians scientists that were studying the clubbing behavior rats on ecstasy.

At the time, we thought that Italy was the place to be if you got reincarnated as a lab rat. 

But those Italians scientists didn’t stop with giving rats ecstasy and exposing them to music at club noise levels.

Somehow, they got the funds to do additional research and this time they studied the sex lives of clubbing rats. 

And it turns out that raving rats, at least in Italy, have pretty lousy sex lives. In fact, a single dose of ecstasy, in combination with loud music, “notably impaired copulatory behavior of sexually experienced male rats”.

In fact, “combined treatment of MDMA and music stimulation did not fully restore normal sexual behavior as the animals reaching ejaculation still showed a marked reduction of copulatory efficiency.”

So, if you’re worried about your copulatory efficiency, and place any weight on scientific studies like this, you’ll want to avoid the “combined treatment of MDMA and music stimulation.” Read more…

Here’s some freaky weird music science accompanied by a scary baby doll photo:

Babies as young as five months old can tell the difference between upbeat and gloomy music, providing more evidence that the brain’s ability to detect emotion develops early.

So, if you’ve got young kids around the house, you may want to put away the Depeche Mode and Smiths LPs and play some nice happy trance music for a while.

“They can tell emotions apart,” said study author Ross Flom, an associate professor of psychology at Brigham Young University, in Provo, Utah. “They don’t understand that this is happy music and this is sad music, but they know they’re different.”

The researchers recruited 96 babies and played various types of music for them, Flom said. Most 5-month-old babies showed signs that they could discriminate between types of music when a happy selection followed a sad selection, but not the other way around, Flom said.

“At nine months, they can tell individual happy pieces and sad pieces apart,” he said. “It shows the remarkable cognitive skills that these kids have. They’ve mastered a lot in nine months — 270 days.”

via US News

Image: Zach_ManchesterUK