The Mozart Effect
(from the Detroit Free Press 1/24/95 - written by Bill Hendrick Cox Newspapers)
Fran Rauscher doesn’t touch her cello anymore. It did weird things to her mind. It transformed her from a child prodigy into a prodigious research scientist who, at 36, is out to convince anyone within earshot of her lilting voice that music is a key to unlocking secrets about the brain.
Without bowing her own cello, which she hasn’t played in 12 years, she keeps quietly producing evidence compelling enough to convince juries of skeptical scientific peers.
In short, by studying groups of toddlers and college students, Rauscher and colleagues at the University of California Irvine’s Center for Neurobiology of Learning have shown that people can enhance some higher brain functions by playing or even listening to music.
Among her provocative conclusions:
• Very young children who take music lessons are better at certain tasks than other kids.
• Music can enhance reasoning abilities at any age.
• Complex music, such as a Mozart Sonata, stimulates the brain. Simpler types such as hard rock may get feet moving but not make brain circuits fire faster.
“These findings are very important and have huge implications,” Rauscher says. “We think we have a powerful weapon for educators. Each child could have a chance to reach full potential.”
Rauscher began studying the links between music and the mind after her “first life” as a virtuoso cellist in the late 1970’s. She quit playing as a professional about 12 years ago, in part because as a perfectionist, she couldn’t stand hitting sour notes.
Soon after taking a job entertaining p gatients in psychiatric wards, she noticed that catatonic patients who never blinked reacted “in a very positive way” to her music. Armed with a bachelor’s degree in music, she went to graduate school to study psychology, then earned a PhD and has been doing research ever since, trying to solve mysteries about the brain, and how it works and why.
What the data said
Rauscher published her first significant finding last year. In a study of 84 college students, she found that those who listened to Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major for 10 minutes before taking IQ tests scored considerably higher than subjects exposed for the same period to silence or a meditation tape.
A subsequent pilot study of 3-year-olds found that those who were given music lessons scored “substantially better” on reasoning tests that other kids. The same experiment, expanded from 1 0 to 33 children last year, produced similar results, “demonstrating an unmistakable link between music and spatial intelligence,” Rauscher says.
The study with college students showed that the “Mozart Effect” made them smarter for only 15 minutes or so. But Rauscher says the impact lasts much longer with young people, “the younger the better.”
Rauscher’s research has found that those who study music and play it at a young age may boost cognitive skills permanently, by priming the brain to process certain kinds of information.
In the latest study, Rauscher and her colleagues studied children between ages 3 and 4 with similar demographic traits. They measured the IQs of the kids, who were divided into two groups. Nineteen received daily group singing lessons, weekly private lessons on electronic keyboards and daily keyboard practice. The other 14 received no musical training.
“We found ‚a big increase (in cognitive skills) in the kids who’d had lessons, both after four months and after eight months,” she says. “This is the first (research) to really show the direct effect of music on this type of brain function.”
After just four months, children taking music were scoring “significantly better” than the other group on spatial intelligence tests, and improvement continued until the end of the study, she says. Tests revealed that kids who had music lessons scored 43 percent higher than those who didn’t.
Spatial intelligence is the ability to perceive the world accurately, to form mental images of physical objects and recognize variations of objects. It’s necessary for such higher brain functions as complex mathematics and chess. “(It’s) essential for architects, navigators, engineers, graphic designers and astronomers,” Rauscher notes.
Educators are widely cheering Rauscher’s work, contending that it should re ”verse what she says is “the commonly held view of music education as essentially irrelevant to intellectual development.”
Mary Rashid, for one, salutes Rauscher’s findings but isn’t surprised by them.
Rashid oversees the music program at Royal Oak’s Shrine High School, which enrolls more than 400 students in grades 7 - 12. She says music students “conceptualize better. They know how to express themselves. They’re the school leaders, the ones who are motivated to become involved in things.”
She has seen Rauscher’s theory played out in her own family.
“One day after school my 7-year-old son, Tommy, was sitting in my classroom playing Beethoven’s ‘Fur Elise.’ A huge Shrine student football player stuck his head in the door. ‘Why can’t you teach me that?’ he joked.
“I said, ‘Why don’t you let Tommy teach you?’ So this big guy sits down beside Tommy, who proceeds to teach him how to play ‘Fur Elise.’ He broke it down for him: ‘First do this, then do this.’ And the Águy picked it up!
“Kids develop that kind of patterning by studying music. They learn how to decode. That’s really what reading music is. And they learn how to communicate it to others in logical patterns.”
Southfield piano teacher Maryann Abramsohn agrees.
“The kids who take piano lessons are always super kids,” she said, “especially if they stick with classical music through high school.
“one of my former students is now a college freshman with a double major in science and piano performance. She was valedictorian of her high school class.
“Another is a pediatric surgeon who just finished her residency at Detroit’s Children’s Hospital. When she was in high school she wanted to be a doctor, but got so completely turned on to music she majored in piano performance at the University of Michigan and took premed courses at the same time. Then she went to med school. That’s typical of what music students are like.”
Kevin McCarthy, music dean at the University of Colorado, has done a çseries of studies the past few years, all showing that musicians rank higher in math, reading and language courses than their peers. He says his findings, based on surveys of thousands of pupils, are consistent, regardless of socioeconomic level or ethnicity.
But even Rauscher points out that researchers remain uncertain about what mechanisms are at work in those cases: Do grades go up because kids are involved in music, or are children who are prone to do well in school more likely to take up trumpets and cellos?
In any case, Rauscher is conducting follow-up studies of 110 preschoolers to determine whether finger dexterity alone has an effect on the brain. In the new study, students who receive computer training will be compared with those who receive piano lessons.
“We think computer training will enhance self-esteem.” she says, “but not have the same improvement in spatial reasoning, and we `’re seeing that already.”
Bravo! for these tunes that stimulate the brain
Classical record labels make concerted efforts to demystify the classics for children and adults.
• Compositions such as Saint-Sæns’ “Carnival of the Animal;s,” Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” and Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” (all available in various recordings at various prices) are good ways to introduce children to classical music, and they also can be beneficial for adults.
•Capitalizing on the research that listening to Mozart can raise IQs, Sony Masterworks has issued a 77-minute recording titled “Mozart Makes You Smarter.” Available in both compact disc and cassette, this recording is aimed at adults. It includes previously released performances of individual movements gleaned from Sony’s catalog; performers include first-rate musicians such as pian `ist Glenn Gould, flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal, guitarist John Williams and conductors Leonard Bernstein and George Szell. The liner notes are a tad cutesy, but the performances are worthwhile. So is the price: as little as $9.99 for the CD and $4.44 for the cassette.
Otherwise, here’s the best of current recordings meant to introduce newcomers to the classics:
•”Gateway to Classical Music” (EMI Classics, $53.99), a set of eighth compact discs containing more than nine hours of music accompanied by a valuable booklet that is, in effect, a painless music history lesson.
•The “Mad About…” series (Deutsche Grammophon, CD $10.99, cassette $6.49), a continuing series consisting of more than 30 titles, each devoted to a specific composer or musical type, with lighthearted, inoffensive liner notes.
Free Press Music Critic John Guinn contributed to this story.