How to beat men at board games… play some AC/DC!

IF the battle of the sexes kicks off during fam- ily board games this Christmas, women might want to try this trick to give them an edge.

To distract your male relatives, you just need to put some loud rock music on the stereo, a study has found.

A blast of AC/DC made no difference to how well women could concentrate – perhaps because their brains are wired differently – but it left men unable to focus. The team behind the study, from Imperial College London and the Royal College of Music, found rock was more distracting for men than classical compositions, but they were unsure why. One explanation may be that its loud volume causes more auditory stress.

Women performed the same in games regardless of whether any or no music was playing. For the study, 352 visitors at the Imperial Festival science show played Operation, in which participants have to painstakingly remove body parts from a patient without setting off a buzzer.

They wore headphones that played either a Mozart piece, Thunderstruck by AC/DC or the sound of an operating theatre. The researchers timed how long it took the volunteers to remove three body parts, as well as tracking mistakes. In men, the rock triggered 36 mistakes on average, while the Mozart and hospital noise led to 28. Music had no effect on women, who took longer to remove body parts than men but made fewer errors.

Lead author Dr Daisy Fancourt, of the RCM, said: ‘Although this study is clearly tonguein-cheek, and was all performed in our spare time, it is part of our wider research into the effect of music on performance.’