LISTENING to Mozart boosts your brain power. At least, that’s the theory that
sent a certain CD soaring to the top of the classical bestsellers list on
Internet bookstore Amazon.com. Music for The Mozart Effect Vol
1—Strengthen the Mind also cracked Billboard magazine’s
classical top ten, where it was joined by a second disc, The Mozart Effect:
Music for Children Vol 1—Tune Up Your Mind.
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.
Advertisement
The first hint of the Mozart Effect emerged more than a decade ago from early
efforts to model brain activity on a computer. In simulations by neurobiologist
Gordon Shaw at the University of California at Irvine, the way nerve cells were
connected to one another predisposed groups of cells to adopt certain specific
firing patterns and rhythms. These natural patterns, he believes, form the basic
grammar of mental activity. In 1988, Shaw and his student Xiaodan Leng decided
to turn the output of their simulations into sounds instead of a conventional
printout. To their surprise, the rhythmic patterns sounded like baroque, new
age, or Eastern music. “I don’t mean it was great music, but we got distinct,
recognisable styles,” Shaw says.
If brain activity can sound like music, Shaw wondered, might we learn to
understand the neural grammar by working backwards and watching how the brain
responds to music? In other words, might patterns in music somehow prime the
brain by activating similar firing patterns of nerve clusters? If so, Shaw
thought he knew where to start: Mozart, a prodigy who began composing at age
four. “We thought if anyone might be tapping into this inherent neural
structure, it might be Mozart,” says Shaw.
So Shaw and his colleague Frances Rauscher, now a psychologist at the
University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, decided to use part of a standard IQ test to
see whether Mozart’s music could temporarily boost people’s ability to visualise
shapes. This ability forms the basis of many complex thinking skills that
involve turning an object over in your mind, including much of mathematics.
In their largest study, published in 1995, Shaw and Rauscher asked 79 college
students to work out what a paper would look like if folded and then cut like a
paper doily. After taking this test, one group of students sat in silence for
ten minutes. Another group listened to a Mozart piano sonata, while a third
group heard either an audiotaped story or minimalist, repetitive music. Then
they all took the test again. The Mozart group correctly predicted 62 per cent
more shapes on the second test, while the “silent” group improved by 14 per cent
and the third group by just 11 per cent.
It is this experiment which has drawn so much criticism from other
researchers. Kenneth Steele, a psychologist at Appalachian State University in
Boone, North Carolina, repeated the experiment but found no sign that Mozart’s
music improved the scores of 125 subjects, even when he scoured individual
scores for signs of improvement (Psychological Science, vol 10, p
366).
At Harvard University, psychologist Christopher Chabris looked at results
from 16 studies hunting for the Mozart Effect, involving a total of 714
subjects. When he analysed all the studies as a group, he found no benefit from
listening to Mozart. He concluded that the real reason some people do better is
what psychologists call “enjoyment arousal”—music improves people’s mood,
so they perform better.
But the critics are only looking at part of the story, says Lois Hetland of
the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Chabris summarised only experiments
that compared Mozart against silence, not against other compositions. Hetland,
who was agnostic about the Mozart Effect, cast a broader net that included every
study to date, a total of 1014 subjects.
She found that Mozart listeners outperformed other groups more often than
could be explained by chance, although the effect was usually much weaker than
Shaw and Rauscher saw. Even these small effects are impressive, says Hetland,
because so many factors could obscure them. “In the early stages of research in
a field, we would expect the measured effect to be small until we learn to
separate the signal from the noise in the research method,” she says. For
example, Mozart may give a bigger boost to some people than to others, depending
on their sex, musical tastes and training, spatial ability, and cultural
background.
Another converted sceptic is psychologist Eric Seigel at Elmhurst College,
Illinois, who set out to disprove the Mozart Effect by using a different spatial
reasoning test. In his test, a subject looks at two letter E’s, with one rotated
at a skewed orientation in relation to the other. The greater the angle, the
harder it is to judge whether the letters are the same or different. The
milliseconds it takes the subject to make that judgment are a precise measure of
spatial reasoning. To Seigel’s surprise, subjects who took the test after
listening to Mozart did significantly better, which Seigel says is in line with
Rauscher’s results in the original paper-folding test. “It was as though they
had practised the test,” says Seigel. “Now we have another way to measure the
Mozart Effect.” Next, he plans to try other experimental designs that may make
the effect stand out even more.
For the sake of consistency, almost all studies on the Mozart Effect so far
have focused on a single piece of music, the Sonata for Two Pianos in D
Major (K 448), though some have measured the effect from other music as
well. “It is not just this composition, and not just Mozart,” says Rauscher.
However, the researchers don’t know why the Sonata in D works or which
other pieces might. Would the music of Mozart’s contemporary Johann Christian
Bach work, or even a 20th-century composer such as Igor Stravinsky? One study
did show that the music of a popular New Age composer, Yanni, had an effect.
Critics take issue with this vagueness, saying that someone has to define
what specific musical elements are required. “They have never specified what it
was about that music, so when other laboratories don’t get the effect, they can
always say it wasn’t the right music,” says Steele.
Studies yet to be published may help clear up this problem. At the University
of Illinois Medical Center, neurologist John Hughes and a musicologist colleague
have analysed hundreds of compositions by Mozart, Chopin and 55 other composers.
They devised a scale that scores how often the music’s loudness rises and falls
in surges of 10 seconds or longer.
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.
Still, there must be something special about Mozart’s music, and not just for
rats. Hughes studied 36 severely epileptic people who suffered almost constant
seizures that sometimes left them comatose. For 29 of those patients, the
debilitating electrical storms that swept their brains became smaller and less
frequent shortly after he began playing Mozart. The same patients
showed no improvement while they listened to a Glass composition, 1930’s pop
tunes, or silence. “Sceptics could criticise the IQ studies,” Hughes says, “but
this is on paper: you can count discharges and watch them decrease during the
Mozart music.” And in comatose patients, at least, the effect cannot be
dismissed as an enjoyment arousal.
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.
-
Further Reading:
Keeping Mozart In Mind by Gordon Shaw (Academic Press, 1999) -
Listening to Mozart enhances spatial-temporal reasoning: Towards a neurophysiological basis
by Frances Rauscher and others, Neuroscience Lettersvol 184, p 44 (1995) -
Prelude or requiem for the Mozart effect?
by Christopher Chabris, Nature,vol 400, p 826 (1999) -
The ‘Mozart effect’ on epileptiform activity
by John Hughes and others, Perceptual and Motor Skills, vol 86, p 835 (1998)