Narrative Ecology – Blog of Ron Donaldson – fACILITATOR, TRAINER AND COACH

Hat tip to Mindhacks for picking up on an amazing newly published study in the  BMJ (British Medical Journal) into headbanging. Now this is very relevant to me as last night I was DJing at our annual Underground Christmas Party in Peterborough and I have traditionally always played Ace of Spades by Motorhead at some point in the evening and last night was no exception.

So in this research McIntosh and Patton have carefully monitored headbangers and plotted the likelyhood of critical injury against tempo of record and found that there is a critical speed and angle of ‘headbang’. Essentially nodding to the music can cause serious brain damage see graph above.

Their advice may not go down well for in conclusion they advocate:

head bangers should decrease their range of head and neck motion, head bang to slower tempo songs by replacing heavy metal with adult oriented rock, only head bang to every second beat

So in future if you want to headbang and be safe, don’t worry about the negative signals you are giving the DJ just bang your head from side to side not up and down and I must start playing more Fleetwood Mac. You know it makes sense.