Which mozart song makes you smarter
The whole point of an IQ is that it is supposed to be unchanging from conception to death. However provocative the new music study seems, other psychologists warned, it is still inconclusive and, the researchers themselves acknowledged sheepishly, open to misinterpretation or abuse by overanxious parents and educational hucksters.
The research grows out of theoretical neurobiology and ideas about how different parts of the brain may communicate with each other. We take those as describing the internal language of the brain. In the study, described in a letter to Nature, 36 college students were given standard IQ tests after listening to Mozart, a recorded relaxation tape or meditating in silence for 10 minutes. Each student was tested after each listening exercise.
The team hopes to determine whether early music training permanently increases IQ. Their work is funded by the National Assn.
To gauge the long-term effects of music on the brain, Shaw and Rauscher are studying 75 3-year-old children, teaching them songs and keyboard playing.
All Sections. Only 36 students took part. The students who listened to Mozart did better at tasks where they had to create shapes in their minds. For a short time the students were better at spatial tasks where they had to look at folded up pieces of paper with cuts in them and to predict how they would appear when unfolded. But unfortunately, as the authors make clear at the time, this effect lasts for about fifteen minutes. Did the complexity of music cause patterns of cortical firing in the brain similar to those associated with solving spatial puzzles?
In a larger meta-analysis of a greater number of studies again found a positive effect, but that other kinds of music worked just as well. One study found that listening to Schubert was just as good, and so was hearing a passage read out aloud from a Stephen King novel. But only if you enjoyed it.
So, perhaps enjoyment and engagement are key, rather than the exact notes you hear. Although we tend to associate the Mozart effect with babies and small children, most of these studies were conducted on adults, whose brains are of course at a very different stage of development. But in a large study was conducted in Britain involving eight thousand children. The children who listened to Mozart did well, but with pop music they did even better, so prior preference could come into it.
The study found the subjects who listened to Mozart showed significantly increased spatial reasoning skills for at least minutes. The southern state of Georgia even started giving newborn babies a free classical CD shortly after the study came out. The same study investigated the long-term effects of music on the brain, by giving a group of three to four-year-old children keyboard lessons for six months.
At the end of training, their performance in a spatial-temporal reasoning test was 30 per cent better than that of children of a similar age who were given computer lessons for six months or no special training. According to the study, this result was down to the greater plasticity of the young brain, and the length of exposure to the music.
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