This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagiato.

Remember scrolling through the radio dial hoping a tune you liked would pop out of the static?

You never had to listen too long to know you'd landed on a hit.

Music has a very strong, remarkably strong hold on us so that it's enough to be exposed to a very brief

snippet of a familiar song for us to be able to recognize it.

Maria Chate, an auditory cognitive neuroscientist at University College London.

Chate and her team recently studied just how quick that reflex is.

They started by asking 10 volunteers to name a feel-good familiar song like this.

Then the researchers hand-picked a second tune that sounded similar but was unfamiliar to the volunteer.

They chopped both songs into tiny bits, each less than a second long, and then randomly interspersed them into a six and a half minute

long track of song snippets.

As the snippets played, the scientists measured the volunteer's brain activity via a network of 128 electrodes,

and they monitored changes in pupil diameter too, a sign of arousal.

And the researchers found that the listener's pupils dilated more rapidly when they heard

familiar versus unfamiliar samples within just a tenth to a third of a second.

Familiar tunes also triggered a two-step pattern of brain activation, almost identical to that scene in other memory studies, where the brain first recognizes something as familiar and then retrieves more detailed information about it. That pattern was absent for unfamiliar something. and The study does have limitations. It used a small number of songs. It was hard to

mask the purpose of the study from the participants and the control group ended up

being primarily international students from Asia since they had to be unfamiliar with every single song.

So their native languages and music backgrounds were different from the experimental group,

which was primarily students from a European background.

Still for clinicians who want to use music as a European background. Still, for clinicians who want to use music

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