Can tunes hijack our perception? Turns out it may be able to. Music can have a brain-bending effect on how we process the days of our lives.

Composer Jonathan Berger wrote a recent essay in Nautilus and went into detail about some of the most confounding effects of music. Clocks keep track of the objective end of things, but our brains and bodies can perceive time with an entirely different rhythm.

Berger describes this as "pysiological metronomes". "This other time creates a parallel temporal world in which we are prone to lose ourselves," he says. When we're engaged, our introspective pre-frontal cortex "switches off"—which allows us to go all Zen.

Berger includes data that seems tailor-made for marketers—apparently people spend more time shopping for groceries and buy more drinks at the bar if the background soundtrack is slow—and for drivers, too.

Head over to Nautilus for more specifics on the neuroscience of music.