Hey Man, Don't Bogart The iPod

Ramblings

from the no-it's-an-herbal-supplement dept

A British psychiatrist says that the increasing use of iPods may lead to an increase in “musical hallucinations”. You can stop trying to smoke your MP3 player now, though, because these hallucinations don’t sound very exciting: people just start hearing some random song and aren’t able to make it stop or “change to another record”, so apparently it’s worse than that afternoon “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?” was stuck in your head. The researcher says that the increasing amount of music people are exposed to these days may cause more of the hallucinations down the road, so to check back in 20 years, but this wouldn’t be the first time doctors have dropped the dime on technology as the cause of new problems that aren’t really new. Ironically, however, the iPod may be the treatment as well as the cause: people that have musical hallucinations say that listening to music surpresses them.