Heavy metal fans may handle pain better than others

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Wacken Open Air is widely considered the world’s heaviest of heavy metal music festivals for good reason. The annual event in northern Germany has drawn metalheads from around the world to the otherwise quiet town since 1990, and regularly features hundreds of the genre’s biggest acts. With upwards of 85,000 headbangers in attendance, the hub of extreme music also occasionally draws another, smaller contingent of visitors—cognitive scientists.

“We knew that suppressed anger has the greatest effect on intensifying pain experiences in patients with chronic pain,” Lydia Schneider, a neuroscience researcher formerly at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, said in a statement. “That’s why we wanted to investigate whether the experience of pain changes—especially with a genre of music like heavy metal, which expresses quite a lot of unpleasant emotions, particularly anger.”

Schneider and her colleague Tom Fritz visited Wacken Open Air to offer concertgoers a challenge: see how long they could endure dipping their hand and forearm into ice water. Prior to the cold plunge, volunteers also recorded their heart rate and heart rate variability using an ECG monitor. Schneider and Fritz ultimately tested  122 volunteers during the festival, then compared their results against a control group of attendees who arrived prior to any bands taking the stage. 

The results weren’t what researchers expected. According to their study recently published in the journal Scientific Reports, participants didn’t find the pain less unpleasant after thrashing at the festival—but they did report it became easier to withstand the pain.

“On the contrary—the festivalgoers were actually able to endure the cold-induced pain for longer than the control group,” explained Schneider.

Instead of adjusting their pain sensitivity, the experiment suggests a correlation between aggressive or angry-sounding music and improved pain tolerance. The researchers say that beyond simply boosting attendees’ mosh pit endurance levels, their findings may prove useful in clinical and therapeutic settings,especially for patients struggling to process chronic pain.

“Music is often used to trigger positive feelings and induce relaxation—but when it comes to letting out one’s anger, you don’t necessarily want to listen to relaxing music,” Fritz added.

Wacken Open Air 2022 headliner Slipknot can probably attest to the findings. The band’s 2004 hit single “Duality” is about their lead vocalist’s migraines.

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Andrew Paul is a staff writer for Popular Science.

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