Can music help you play better minigolf? What about SMELLS?
Improbable Research, the website behind the Ig Nobel Prize, has brought to our attention some crucial research in this area.
About Ways of Psychoemotional Status Regulation of Minigolf Players is a piece of research published in the Medcrave Online Journal of Sports Medicine. In the name of science, a group of Russian boffins in Moscow bombarded minigolf players with music and odours to find out which ones made them perform best. We think that’s hilarious, so we’re sharing it with you.
Here’s a typical sentence from the study: ” The
functional status of an athlete organism is directly bound to his
psychoemotional states – conditions of stress, optimum readiness
and frustration.’
The researchers assessed the players’ minigolf performance before and after playing them music at 54 BPM and releasing various pongs.
“Odorants represented
10% of mix of essential oils of bergamot, ylang-ylang, lemon,
mint, sage muscat, basilic, geraniums, lavenders, rosemary and an
eucalyptus in different combinations in oil of grape seed.”
The scientists took 13520 measurements of blood pressure and heart rate to assess the psychoemotional state of the players. Their conclusion, if you can call it that, is ““It is established that the effect of influence of the functional music is comparable with effect of influence of an activating odorant and exhaustion.”
So does this mean minigolf courses will soon be full of people playing chill-out music on their earphones and sniffing bottles of essential oil?
Do you have some favourite music you listen to when you play? And as for smells, well, we reckon that a true minigolf player just needs the smell of eternite and injection-moulded plastic to get into the Zone. That is the true smell of victory!
