REAL LIFE CHRISTMAS NEWS: HOW TO WIN AT FAMILY BOARD GAMES
by Hazed
Ah, the Christmas family tradition of bickering over a board game. Whether it’s a mammoth game of monopoly that ends with the board being dashed to the floor by a loser, or a trivial pursuit contest that causes several people to storm off in a huff, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without board game strife.
If winning at a board game really matters to you, here’s a trick to make sure you are the victor.
Women: be sure to put some heavy metal music on the stereo. Or, men: avoid listening to heavy rock.
This advice is thanks to scientists at Imperial College London who teamed up with musicians from the Royal College of Music to examine how music affects performance.
They got 352 people who visited the college’s annual science festival to play a game of Operation while listening to one of three different background sounds, which were assigned randomly: either a Mozart piano sonata, Thunderstruck by AC/DC, or the sound of an operating theatre.
The participants were 184 men and 143 women (and presumably 25 people who preferred not to categorised).
For those not familiar with Operation, it’s a game that involves using tweezers to remove plastic body parts from the body of a cartoon patient, named Cavity Sam. Sam has a red light on his nose and it lights up every time a player touches the edge of a cavity. In this version, players who made the nose light up also received a mild electric shock. Because scientists are sadists!
Participants were timed as they removed three body parts, and the number of mistakes they made were recorded.
The results were surprising. Women were not only better than men at the game overall (ha!), they were not at all affected by the choice of music. But men who listened to the AC/DC made more mistakes and were slower, compared to the other two groups of men. “Thunderstruck triggered around 36 mistakes on average, while the Sonata and operating theatre noises caused 28,” according to Imperial College London.
So there you have it. Women can beat men at tasks requiring concentration if they pump up the heavy metal.
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/12/win_at_board_games_festive_rock_music/
