Thinking and music seem to go together. Albert Einstein played the violin to stimulate his mind, and many people listen to classical music for the same purpose. But can it make you smarter? Probably, at least for a while, according to tantalizing findings by Gordon L. Shaw, a theoretical physicist at the University of California at Irvine. The man behind the “Mozart effect” was interviewed recently in Chicago.
Q: As a result of your findings indicating that some types of music can actually enhance learning, do you think that music may turn out to be as vital to well-being as exercise and sleep?
A: I think so. The more we understand about the impact of music on the brain, the more we’ll see how important music is. We’re aware of the emotional impact of music. But we’re saying it goes way beyond that. It has an effect on the reasoning and thinking part of the brain too.
Q: How did you become interested in the connection between music and learning?
A: We first started working on a model of the brain that represents how we might think and reason. Music was the last thing on our minds. Physicists look for patterns and relationships. Our model was based on the idea that groups of neurons formed networks and that these networks eventually involved the whole brain. It looked pretty neat in our computer to see brain wave activity from thinking represented in sequences of identifiable patterns.
Q: What led to the discovery of the Mozart effect?
A: About 10 years ago, a colleague in my lab, Xiao Dan Leng, translated the patterns from our computer model into music using a synthesizer. Instead of seeing these patterns on the computer screen, we thought that maybe they would sound like something that could help us understand what they were doing. When she did that, she obtained recognizable styles of Western music–patterns that might sound Baroque or New Age or folk. Not that it was super music, but it sounded really interesting.
Q: What did that tell you?
A: We realized that that’s one of the key properties of music: It has the kinds of symmetries and patterns that we were tracking in brain waves. We were pretty amazed. Other people thought the sounds were nice, but it was a huge leap from there to suggest that music could enhance how we all think and reason.
Q: Does that mean we are born with the ability to process music in a fairly sophisticated manner?
A: Yes, we think so. Carol Krumhansl at Cornell University plays segments of Mozart to 4-month-old babies and then changes the rest of the music so that it is out of sequence. The infants don’t like it. They like the way it was originally written in a sequence of patterns.
Q: If babies dislike jumbled-up Mozart, does that mean they prefer order to chaos?
A: Again, yes. That, along with our work on patterns, gave us the idea that maybe music is really tapping into an inherent structure in the brain. So, we put all of our ideas together and predicted that early music training could exercise the brain’s inherent ability to form patterns and enhance spatial reasoning where you’re able to see patterns develop in space and time.
Q: Your first experiment with college students showed that those who listened to Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos were much better at solving puzzles than those exposed to silence or music made up of repetitive sounds. Why did you select Mozart?
A: We thought that if anybody was tapping into this inherent structure for patterns it was Mozart. Here’s this incredible genius who was composing at age 3 and writing down whole pieces without modifying them. Frances Rauscher, who did the studies with college students and later with 3-year-olds, went through more than 100 of Mozart’s works and selected the Sonata K.448 as being representative of this brain language. When you listen to it you hear something that’s very cerebral, not just emotional.
Q: What kind of puzzles did the college students do?
A: It’s called the paper folding and cutting test. You see a drawing of a piece of paper that’s folded over three or four times. Several cuts are made in the folded paper and then you mentally have to unfold it and select the correct appearance from five samples.
Q: The idea was to see whether short-term exposure to music could prime the brain so that it more efficiently would solve this kind of problem. How did the students do?
A: Compared with students who were exposed to silence or listened to repetitive music, those who listened to the Mozart sonata prior to the test did 30 percent better. We reported that in the journal Nature in 1993, and it got a lot of publicity. The idea that music could enhance how you think seemed like a short-term fix that didn’t cost you anything.
Q: Rauscher’s work with 3-year-olds had one group taking piano lessons for six months, another group taking computer lessons and a third group doing neither. What did you find?
A: The only children who improved in their spatial reasoning over this period were those who took piano lessons, and they increased their test scores by 35 percent. We think music enhances their ability to see patterns and relationships, which is useful for such things as geometry, fractions and reading maps.
Q: You now are working with an inner-city school in Los Angeles to see whether music training can improve test scores. What do you expect to find?
A: We think that music training will improve the ability of the children to see patterns. The bottom line is that if we can significantly improve the math test scores of disadvantaged children, then music potentially could help most children.
Q: Faced with budget crunches, the Los Angeles public school system got rid of its music programs. Have your findings encouraged administrators to change their minds?
A: I think our work is making a difference. There is an attempt to bring music back into the L.A. schools.
Q: Have your findings changed your listening habits?
A: Surely. I listen to a lot more Mozart.
Q: How can your findings be used by parents, teachers, business people and others who are interested in educating children?
A: We hope in the next few years to be able to make much more positive statements. But already with our preschool studies and some of the other stuff, if you put it together, it looks like playing good music, not while you’re trying to think but preceding it, or taking music lessons, is a good thing to do. The point is that there are no bad side effects. If all of this turns out to be an accident, then the worst you’ve done is listened to good music or learned to play an instrument. But we don’t think the research will turn out that way. We think good things will come from listening to music.
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An edited transcript
