Have you ever wondered if listening to certain music weakens your mind? No problem, Virgil Griffith, a Ph.D. candidate at Cal Tech has an answer for you. He asked a series of questions:
Could one’s musical tastes say something about intelligence? How about SAT scores? Well, like any good scientist, I decided to see how well my personal experience matches reality.
How did he do it? He downloaded the ten most frequent “favorite music” mentions at every college via that college’s Network Statistics page on Facebook. He then downloaded the average SAT/ACT score (from the College Board) for students attending every college.
This yielded 1352 schools that had data on both Facebook and the College Board. Below is a chart showing music by SAT scores. At Mr. Griffith’s site, you can find your school and its top 10 songs. Or, your favorite artists ranked by the average SAT of the schools that rated them. And yes, Mr. Griffith realizes that correlation ≠ causality, so no need to send an email saying that. Not all of the data are complete for each school, but check your where your favorite group/music genre on the chart, and weep:
Georgetown lists U2, Jack Johnson, Coldplay, The Beatles and The Killers as its top 5. We focus on The Killers for your Friday Music Break. Here is“Mister Brightside” Live from Royal Albert Hall in 2009:
The Killers @ Royal Albert Hall is a fabulous concert. The crowd knows the music, the band is energized throughout. See the entire concert if you have time. Here is one more song from it, “When You Were Young”:
They picked the venue specifically for the DVD, then made tickets available through various chapters of their fan clubs. Everybody in that crowd is a die-hard fan.
It shows.
