In 2006, Dr. Luciano Bernardi, professor of internal medicine at Italy’s University of Pavia and an enthusiastic amateur musician, designed an experiment to study the effects of music on the cardiovascular and respiratory systems of his participants.
Bernardi randomly ordered six types of music and inserted two-minute “pauses” of silence to bring the subjects back to baseline—a control point for experiments. Yet contrary to his expectations, when the subjects listened to these pauses, they didn’t return to baseline at all—instead, they relaxed.
