Think this is scary? Try closing your eyes (Image: Archive Photos/Getty Images)

Singers and guitar heroes alike have always employed what you might call the Celine Dion effect – closing your eyes to heighten the emotional impact of music.

Now, neuroscientists have discovered that a brain centre involved in sensing emotion and fear called the amygdala kicks into action when volunteers listen to scary music with eyes closed.

“A lot of time we do like to close our eyes when we listen to music, we feel like this is a more powerful experience,” says Talma Hendler, a neuroscientist at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center in Israel, who led the new brain imaging study.


Shutting your eyes heightens people’s emotional responses to the outside world, suggests previous research – not to mention everyday experience.

Spooky sounds

To uncover any neural basis for this effect, Hendler’s team scanned the brains of 15 volunteers while they listened to film scores – “kind of Hitchcock-like movies,” she says – and less emotive keyboard tunes with their eyes open or shut.

Hear a scary clip here and a neutral one here.

Sure enough, volunteers rated the eerie-sounding music – laced with staccato strings, ominous trombones, and weird effects – as more emotional than the “elevator music”-like keyboard tunes.

Under the gaze of a functional-MRI scanner, horror film scores elicited significantly more amygdala activity in the brains of volunteers who kept their eyes shut, compared to when they kept eyes open. Participants’ brains responded no differently to the neutral music whether their eyes were closed or open.

Threat response

Furthermore, a part of the brain stem that metes out the neurotransmitter noradrenalin in response to threats was more active when volunteers listened to scary music with their eyes closed than open, as was a neocortical brain region known to control emotion – the ventral prefrontal cortex.

None of these changes occurred when volunteers listened to scary music in total darkness, suggesting that temporary blindness – which could certainly heighten fear – doesn’t explain the results, Hendler says.

She also thinks her team results aren’t limited to scary movie soundtracks. “I suspect if we had music that was positive, we would get a similar effect.”

Journal reference: PLoS ONE (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0006230)