Music Can Change (the Way We See) the World

Music Can Change (the Way We See) the World

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The way you perceive things may be influenced by your playlist. Last year researchers in the Netherlands found that the music one listens to can temporarily change a person’s visual perception and affect what they think they see.

In this study, 43 young adults were asked to look at a computer screen and perform a visual detection task. Each subject came prepared with 30 minutes of their own music, 15 minutes of tunes that they found to be happy and 15 minutes that they found to be sad. Researchers found that people were most accurate at correctly detecting happy faces when listening to happy music and most accurate at detecting sad faces when listening to sad music. Even more intriguing was the fact that people gave a lot of false positive responses correlating to the mood of the music of which they were listening, suggesting that visual perception is influenced not just by our experience and expectations alone but also by our current state of emotions or mood and it may be altered by our music.