Statistically, childrens'
test scores rise significantly if the test is taken a short
time after listening to even
ten minutes of classical music. However, the
music does not cause long-term
improvement.
Here is an interesting article that can also be
found at
http://www.math.niu.edu/~rusin/papers/uses-math/music/learning
on the subject:
MUSIC POWER ENHANCES BRAIN FUNCTION
(Boston Globe, 10/94)
This is what our scanner/OCR read it as:
[Retouched 12/1998 -- djr]
By RICHARD A. KNOX of the Boston Globe
Music -- either performing it or listening to it
-- has the power to
enhance some kinds of higher brain function, a
University of
California research team has shown in new experiments
with adults and
preschool children.
But it has to be the right kind of music.
The findings, reported recently at the American
Psychological
Association meetings in Los Angeles, open new windows
onto the way the
brain works and how it can be primed to work better,
They provide
encouragement to a small but growing band of psychologists
and
educators who say music and other arts should be
integrated into core
curricula, not treated as frills offered - if at
all - only to the
artistically inclined.
The studies could "revitalize the role of music
in public education,"
the researchers conclude in a paper prepared for
the psychology
conference.
"There is a causal link between music and spatial
reasoning,"
co-author Frances Rauscher of the University of
California at Irvine
added in a telephone interview. "We now know
it's true for the short
term in adults, just from listening to music.
It's true for eight
months and probably longer in preschool children,
by actually studying
music. So there's no reason to expect it
would not be true for older
kids."
Rauscher and her colleagues at UC Irvine's Center
for the Neurobiology
of Learning and Memory attracted considerable attention
last October
with a report in the British journal Nature on
what they call "the
Mozart effect."
After listening for 10 minutes to a tape of Mozart's
sonata for two
pianos in D major, K. 488, college students in
that earlier experiment
scored approximately 9 points higher in IQ tests
of abstract spatial
reasoning than subjects exposed to 10 minutes of
silence or a
meditation tape.
Spatial reasoning tasks, which are generally processed
by the brain's
right hemisphere, involve the orientation of shapes
in space. Such
tasks are relevant to a wide range of endeavors,
from higher
mathematics and geometry to architecture, engineering,
drawing and
playing chess.
One of the experiments reported replicated and extended
the "Mozart
effect" findings. Among 84 undergraduates
in the subsequent study,
those who listened to the same Mozart piece and
then had to solve
visual puzzles involving folded cutout shapes scored
much higher than
others who listened to IO minutes of silence, although
the "silence"
group caught up on successive days.
Interestingly, listening to other types of music
-- the monotonous
repeating harmonies of a Philip Glass composition
("Music with
Changing Parts") or the thumping rhythms of electronic
British-style
"trance" music, which Rauscher calls "technopop"
-- did not enhance
subjects' spatial test scores.
Neither Mozart nor the other music had any effect
on subjects' ability
to perform tests of short-term memory, which was
consistent with the
researchers' prediction about how the brain processes
certain kinds of
musical and spatial input.
The researchers believe that listening to Mozart's
music, with its
complex patterns of evolving musical themes, somehow
primes some of
the same neural circuits that the brain employs
for complex
visual-spatial tasks. They base their ideas
on a "neural network"
theory of music perception developed in 1990 by
Gordon Shaw and
Xiaodan Leng of UC Irvine and Eric Wright of the
Irvine Conservatory
of Music.
"In a nutshell, you have these neural pathways throughout
your
cortex," the higher brain centers involved in perception
and thought,
Rauscher explained. "The theory is when you
experience something or
learn something, these connections become stronger."
The psychologist cautioned that the "Mozart effect"
does not imply
that pop music is toxic to the brain.
"That has been a huge point of misunderstanding,"
Rauscher said.
"When the first study came out, people got the
idea that if Mozart
would have this enhancing effect, heavy metal rock
'n' roll would have
the opposite. I got a lot of backlash from
that, including death
threats from heavy-metal musicians calling me at
home. We're not
saying that heavy metal is going to bum out your
brain."
The UC Irvine group believes that other kinds of
music would enhance
spatial reasoning as long as it shares with Mozart
patterns of
symmetry and evolving musical themes. That
might include some kinds
of rock 'n' roll, Indian music and improvisational
jazz.
As provocative as the "Mozart effect" studies are,
the researchers
found that the effect is short-lived, 15 minutes
at most. After that,
Mozart listeners do no better on spatial tests
than others.
To determine whether music can have more lasting
benefits for
spatial learning, the California researchers studied
a group of
3-year-olds enrolled in a Los Angeles public preschool
program. Of
the 33 children, 22 received eight months of special
music training --
daily group singing lessons, weekly private lessons
on electronic
keyboards and daily opportunity for keyboard practice
and play.
When tested on a spatial reasoning task -- assembling
pictures out of
puzzle pieces -- "the children's scores dramatically
improved after
they received music lessons," the researchers reported.
Among
preschoolers without music training, spatial test
scores remained
unchanged over the eight-month experiment.
The music group's scores on other cognitive tasks
were no different
from the non-music group, consistent with the researchers'
predictions. Like musical performance, assembling
disparate visual
elements into a coherent picture "requires forming
an ideal mental
representation of something which is eventually
realized," the
scientists said.
Future studies will investigate different spatial
reasoning tests,
other types of music instruction and different
ages.
"We have shown that music education may be a valuable
tool for the
enhancement of preschool children's intellectual
development," the
researchers said. The group wants to show whether
music training
improves cognitive skills of school-age children,
find out how long
the effect lasts, and identify the mechanism behind
it.
Others interested in the integration of music and
other arts in
school curricula were enthusiastic about the new
studies.
"The main reason we teach music is because music
itself is
worthwhile," said Paul Lehman, dean of the University
of Michigan
school of music. "But at the same time music
does a lot of other good
things too, and especially in times when music
is being cut back in
school curricula."