Picture a scene that many students know all too well: turning the page during a three-hour final to find that every question on it has two answers that seem right — or worse, none that look correct at all. Having spent weeks studying for this exam, the high-achieving student knows they prepared well. Still, the questions seem to be suggesting that they might have not studied hard enough. Hovering their pencil above the paper as the clock on the wall ticks louder, their thoughts split in two: “I am confident that I know this answer” versus “I did not study enough, so any answer I pick will be wrong.”

That mental tug-of-war is known as cognitive dissonance, the psychological tension of holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously. During these moments, the brain becomes defensive and scrambles for relief by rushing to an answer to escape the discomfort, second-guessing decisions, or just by shutting down. As it turns out, music may be able to help. In the early 1990s, psychologists began debating the idea that listening to classical music could temporarily boost cognitive performance on spatial reasoning tasks. This claim soon gave way to a phenomenon known as the “Mozart effect.” However, the nuance quickly disappeared once the public began to see it as proof that classical music simply makes you smarter. Within a few years, the effect was re-framed as modest, short-lived, and possibly unrelated to music altogether.

By 2013, researchers returned to this debate with a different theoretical framework to ask which cognitive processes might be changing during improved performance. When tension becomes intolerable, individuals may slow their learning processes by avoiding or suppressing conflicting ideas. But if learning depends on confronting contradiction, then is the ability to tolerate dissonance central to intellectual development? This led researchers toward a new hypothesis: can music help students push beyond the stress of test-taking anxiety? To test it, students were placed into three groups based on whether they perceived a given background music as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. They were then asked to answer a series of difficult multiple choice questions.

The study found that students who experienced the music as pleasant scored higher, and further analyses suggested the music helped prevent stress from affecting the time students were willing to spend thinking through challenging questions. Though it did not resolve contradiction, it appeared to buffer the stress response associated with uncertainty.

Music has been a prominent force in many cultures throughout history, and upon close examination, its persistence seems less accidental and more adaptational. If pleasant music can increase our tolerance for uncertainty, it may be one of the oldest cognitive support systems we carry, especially when pressure is high. So, the next time you turn the page and find your thoughts splitting in two, remember: it might not be about intelligence at all.