06 November 1999
LISTENING to Mozart boosts your brain power. ...
The excitement started six years ago when researchers reported that people scored better on a standard IQ test after listening to Mozart. But last summer, this "Mozart Effect" suffered a setback when several sceptics repeated the original study but failed to find any improvement.
This is not the end of the story, though. A closer look shows that Mozart's music does have a profound effect on the brain, though no one yet knows why. Rats raised on Mozart run through mazes faster and more accurately. People with Alzheimer's disease function more normally if they listen to Mozart and the music even reduces the severity of epileptic seizures.
Minimalist music by the composer Philip Glass and pop tunes scored among the lowest on this measure, he found, with Mozart scoring two to three times higher. Hughes predicts that sequences repeating regularly every 20 to 30 seconds may trigger the strongest response in the brain, because many functions of the central nervous system, such as the onset of sleep and brain wave patterns, also occur in 30-second cycles. And of all the music analysed, Mozart most often peaks every 30 seconds, Hughes found. Results such as these may help predict which pieces of music have the strongest effect on the brain, says Hughes, who hopes to begin testing brain response soon.
Meanwhile, another of Shaw's collaborators, Julene Johnson of the Institute of Brain Aging and Dementia at the University of California at Irvine, gave Shaw's original paper-folding test to Alzheimer's patients, who often have impaired spatial reasoning because of their illness. In a pilot study, one patient's scores improved by 3 or 4 correct answers out of 8 test items after 10-minute doses of Mozart, but not after silence or popular music from the 1930s. "The popular tune was familiar to the patient and intended to account for a possible emotional effect of music versus silence," says Johnson. She has now followed up with a group study comparing Mozart versus silence in 18 patients. Though results are not yet published, Mozart did improve the patients' test scores, especially in people who showed little improvement after practising the test.
Even stronger support for Mozart's effect on the brain comes from other studies. Rauscher, for example, subjected 30 rats to 12 hours of the Sonata in D daily for over two months. (Pity the poor laboratory staff!) These rats ran a maze an average of 27 per cent faster and with 37 per cent fewer errors than 80 other rats raised with white noise or in silence, she found. And this improvement can't be due to enjoyment arousal, because rats have no emotional response to Mozart. Instead, the study suggests a neurological basis for the Mozart Effect, says Rauscher.
Rat-squeak sonata?
Steele, a specialist in animal learning, is not convinced. After all, he says, a rat's brain is organised to respond to rat-squeak sounds, not European music. "What is the line of reasoning that rat brains respond the same way as humans? There is nothing in terms of current evolutionary or psychological theory that suggests there would be a related effect on rat brains. It is a great speculative leap," he says.
Rauscher does acknowledge that Mozart may simply give the rats a richer, more stimulating environment, something the rats could also get from other distractions or activities. "The control group rats are severely deprived—an extreme condition," she admits. She has begun a new study comparing rats with the heavy Mozart diet to rats given plenty of social interaction and toys in their cages.
Another study, by Shaw and neurobiologist Mark Bodner of the University of California at Los Angeles, used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to map the regions of a subject's brain that respond while listening to Mozart, `30s pop music, or Beethoven's Für Elise. Not surprisingly, Bodner found that all music activates the auditory cortex, where the brain processes sound, and sometimes triggers parts of the brain that are associated with emotion. "But with Mozart, the whole cortex is lighting up," Bodner says. Specifically, only Mozart also activates areas of the brain involved in fine motor coordination, vision, and other higher thought processes, all of which might be expected to come into play for spatial reasoning.
Unfortunately, an MRI scan won't tell you anything about how a person may respond to the music. "I don't doubt that music affects the brain, even beyond auditory cortex—it must," responds Chabris. But he doubts those measurable effects actually cause any of the changes in spatial reasoning or other abilities.
But these short-term improvements may not be Mozart's most important effect on the brain. In a five-year study with children, Rauscher has found that keyboard music training improves skills that require mental imagery—and after two years of lessons, the effect doesn't wear off. "All of the Mozart Effect experiments are based on the idea that the brain can be anatomically influenced by music. With children it may be actually building the neural network," says Rauscher. In other words, a childhood rich in music may have lasting benefits. This may be finally where the Mozart Effect makes its real encore.
Gary Kliewer is a freelance science writer living in Ashland, Oregon
From issue 2211 of New Scientist magazine, 06 November 1999, page 34
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg16422115.100-the-mozart-effect.html
LISTENING to Mozart boosts your brain power. ...
The excitement started six years ago when researchers reported that people scored better on a standard IQ test after listening to Mozart. But last summer, this "Mozart Effect" suffered a setback when several sceptics repeated the original study but failed to find any improvement.
This is not the end of the story, though. A closer look shows that Mozart's music does have a profound effect on the brain, though no one yet knows why. Rats raised on Mozart run through mazes faster and more accurately. People with Alzheimer's disease function more normally if they listen to Mozart and the music even reduces the severity of epileptic seizures.
Minimalist music by the composer Philip Glass and pop tunes scored among the lowest on this measure, he found, with Mozart scoring two to three times higher. Hughes predicts that sequences repeating regularly every 20 to 30 seconds may trigger the strongest response in the brain, because many functions of the central nervous system, such as the onset of sleep and brain wave patterns, also occur in 30-second cycles. And of all the music analysed, Mozart most often peaks every 30 seconds, Hughes found. Results such as these may help predict which pieces of music have the strongest effect on the brain, says Hughes, who hopes to begin testing brain response soon.
Meanwhile, another of Shaw's collaborators, Julene Johnson of the Institute of Brain Aging and Dementia at the University of California at Irvine, gave Shaw's original paper-folding test to Alzheimer's patients, who often have impaired spatial reasoning because of their illness. In a pilot study, one patient's scores improved by 3 or 4 correct answers out of 8 test items after 10-minute doses of Mozart, but not after silence or popular music from the 1930s. "The popular tune was familiar to the patient and intended to account for a possible emotional effect of music versus silence," says Johnson. She has now followed up with a group study comparing Mozart versus silence in 18 patients. Though results are not yet published, Mozart did improve the patients' test scores, especially in people who showed little improvement after practising the test.
Even stronger support for Mozart's effect on the brain comes from other studies. Rauscher, for example, subjected 30 rats to 12 hours of the Sonata in D daily for over two months. (Pity the poor laboratory staff!) These rats ran a maze an average of 27 per cent faster and with 37 per cent fewer errors than 80 other rats raised with white noise or in silence, she found. And this improvement can't be due to enjoyment arousal, because rats have no emotional response to Mozart. Instead, the study suggests a neurological basis for the Mozart Effect, says Rauscher.
Rat-squeak sonata?
Steele, a specialist in animal learning, is not convinced. After all, he says, a rat's brain is organised to respond to rat-squeak sounds, not European music. "What is the line of reasoning that rat brains respond the same way as humans? There is nothing in terms of current evolutionary or psychological theory that suggests there would be a related effect on rat brains. It is a great speculative leap," he says.
Rauscher does acknowledge that Mozart may simply give the rats a richer, more stimulating environment, something the rats could also get from other distractions or activities. "The control group rats are severely deprived—an extreme condition," she admits. She has begun a new study comparing rats with the heavy Mozart diet to rats given plenty of social interaction and toys in their cages.
Another study, by Shaw and neurobiologist Mark Bodner of the University of California at Los Angeles, used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to map the regions of a subject's brain that respond while listening to Mozart, `30s pop music, or Beethoven's Für Elise. Not surprisingly, Bodner found that all music activates the auditory cortex, where the brain processes sound, and sometimes triggers parts of the brain that are associated with emotion. "But with Mozart, the whole cortex is lighting up," Bodner says. Specifically, only Mozart also activates areas of the brain involved in fine motor coordination, vision, and other higher thought processes, all of which might be expected to come into play for spatial reasoning.
Unfortunately, an MRI scan won't tell you anything about how a person may respond to the music. "I don't doubt that music affects the brain, even beyond auditory cortex—it must," responds Chabris. But he doubts those measurable effects actually cause any of the changes in spatial reasoning or other abilities.
But these short-term improvements may not be Mozart's most important effect on the brain. In a five-year study with children, Rauscher has found that keyboard music training improves skills that require mental imagery—and after two years of lessons, the effect doesn't wear off. "All of the Mozart Effect experiments are based on the idea that the brain can be anatomically influenced by music. With children it may be actually building the neural network," says Rauscher. In other words, a childhood rich in music may have lasting benefits. This may be finally where the Mozart Effect makes its real encore.
Gary Kliewer is a freelance science writer living in Ashland, Oregon
From issue 2211 of New Scientist magazine, 06 November 1999, page 34
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg16422115.100-the-mozart-effect.html
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