According to a study conducted by the department of psychology at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, the type of music you prefer says a lot about what kind of personality you have. The Independent summarizes the results of the study:
Indie: Devotees have low self-esteem and are not very hard-working, kind or generous. However, they are creative.
Rock ‘n’ Roll: Fans have high self-esteem and are very creative, hard-working and at ease with themselves, but not very kind or generous.
Blues: High self-esteem, creative, outgoing and at ease with themselves.
Classical: Classical music lovers have high self-esteem, are creative and at ease with themselves, but not outgoing.
Heavy metal: Very creative and at ease with themselves, but not very outgoing or hard-working.
Reggae: High self-esteem, creative, outgoing, kind, generous and at ease with themselves, but not very hard-working.
Country & Western: Very hard-working and outgoing.
Dance: Creative and outgoing but not kind or generous.
Rap: High self-esteem, outgoing.
The biggest surprise that people have noted is the high correspondence in the personality profile between those who prefer classical music and those who prefer heavy metal.
Categories: Arts · Human Behavior · Science
An article in the Boston Globe on the role of daydreaming relates the following tale:
ON A SUNDAY morning in 1974, Arthur Fry sat in the front pews of a Presbyterian church in north St. Paul, Minn. An engineer at 3M, Fry was also a singer in the church choir. He had gotten into the habit of inserting little scraps of paper into his choir book, so that he could quickly find the right hymns during the service. The problem, however, was that the papers would often fall out, causing Fry to lose his place.
But then, while listening to the Sunday sermon, Fry started to daydream. Instead of focusing on the pastor’s words, he began to mull over his bookmark problem. “It was during the sermon,” Fry remembers, “that I first thought, ‘What I really need is a little bookmark that will stick to the paper but will not tear the paper when I remove it.’ ” That errant thought – the byproduct of a wandering mind – would later become the yellow Post-it note, one of the most successful office products of all time.
The article also references a study that links television viewing by children to a decreased proficiency at productive daydreaming.
Teresa Belton, a research associate at East Anglia University in England, first got interested in daydreaming while reading a collection of stories written by children in elementary school. Although Belton encouraged the students to write about whatever they wanted, she was startled by just how uninspired most of the stories were.
“The tales tended to be very tedious and unimaginative,” Belton says, “as if the children were stuck with this very restricted way of thinking. Even when they were encouraged to think creatively, they didn’t really know how.”
After monitoring the daily schedule of the children for several months, Belton came to the conclusion that their lack of imagination was, at least in part, caused by the absence of “empty time,” or periods without any activity or sensory stimulation. She noticed that as soon as these children got even a little bit bored, they simply turned on the television: the moving images kept their minds occupied. “It was a very automatic reaction,” she says. “Television was what they did when they didn’t know what else to do.”
The problem with this habit, Belton says, is that it kept the kids from daydreaming. Because the children were rarely bored – at least, when a television was nearby – they never learned how to use their own imagination as a form of entertainment. “The capacity to daydream enables a person to fill empty time with an enjoyable activity that can be carried on anywhere,” Belton says. “But that’s a skill that requires real practice. Too many kids never get the practice.”
Categories: Human Behavior · Science
