Washington, September 16 : Scary music sounds even scarier with the listener’s eyes shut, say Tel Aviv University researchers in Israel.

This finding attains significance as it suggests that music therapy may prove very helpful in treating people with brain disorders, the researchers add.

Prof. Talma Hendler, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at Tel Aviv University''s Functional Brain Center, says that the simple act of voluntarily closing one''s eyes — instead of listening to music and sounds in the dark — can elicit more intense physical responses in the brain itself.

Writing about her findings in PLoS One, she revealed that her research builds on her 2007 study published in Cerebral Cortex.

She has observed that, when the eyes are closed, a region in our brain called the amygdala is fired up.

She says that this makes the experience of scary music more intense emotionally as well as physically.

Dr. Hendler says that the finding suggests that the converse of the scary music effect—happy music producing a joyous effect with closed eyes—may also be true.

She says that listening to sounds with our eyes closed seems to wire together a direct connection to the regions of our brains that process emotions.

"Music is a relatively abstract emotional carrier. It can easily take one''s subjective personal experience and manipulate it. Our new findings, however, suggest that the effect is not only subjective. Using a functional MRI (fMRI), we can see that distinct changes in the brain are more pronounced when a person''s eyes are not being used," says Prof. Hendler.

During the study, the researchers had 15 healthy volunteers listen to spooky Hitchcock-style music, and then neutral sounds with no musical melody.

The participants heard the sounds twice: once with their eyes open, and a second time with their eyes shut.

Simultaneously, the researchers monitored the participants’ brain activity with an fMRI.

Dr. Yulia Lerner, a post-doctoral fellow at Prof. Hendler''s lab, observed that brain activity peaked when the subjects'' eyes were closed while listening to the scary music.

The medical finding corresponded to volunteer feedback that the subjects felt more emotionally charged by the scary music, said the researcher.

The amygdala, the region of the brain in which emotions are located, was significantly more active when the subjects'' eyes were closed.

"It''s possible that closing one''s eyes during an emotional stimulation, like in our research, may help people through a variety of mental states. It synchs connectivity in the brain. We don''t know exactly how or why this happens — it''s like a light switch gets turned off, allowing the brain to better integrate the highs and lows of the emotional experience when the eyes are shut," Dr. Hendler says.

Highlighting the fact that music brings balance to the brain and more readily integrates the affective and cognitive centres of our mind, she says that it may help us think better and even improve our learning abilities.

She, however, stresses the need for more studies to determine their findings.

"This study is the first time scientists have looked inside the brain non-invasively, to examine what happens to the brain under these conditions," says Prof. Hendler.

The findings, the researchers hope, can be applied to therapies that achieve more significant and longer-lasting effects without chemical intervention.

While her study just touches on the connection of physical and emotional activity in the brain, Prof. Hendler doesn''t rule out music therapy in alleviating symptoms in chronic mental disorders such as depression, Schizophrenia and Parkinson''s, in the future. (ANI)