(I wrote this as a term paper for the course, The Psychology Of Music, taught at Harvard University in the spring of 2013 by Professor Peter Cariani. The paper has been updated to reflect new research up to 12/2016).
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| W. Mozart, by Joseph Lange Stiftung Mozarteum Salzburg |
I. Introduction
For over half a century,
cognitive neuroscientists have explored whether there is a causal relationship
between listening to music and enhancement of cognitive ability. Reducing this
reasoned inquiry to its more simplistic “sound bite” form, does music make one
“smarter?” Can listening to music,
especially certain types of music, or perhaps the music of certain composers,
lead to greater mental capacities of memory and intellect? Is music hard-wired in the human brain, and
in turn, does music hard-wire the brain?
Or, is this “music-mind- stuff” just hype, a persistent neuromyth,
nothing more than anecdotal and uncontrolled pseudoscience, marketing ploy
rather than hard science. This paper reviews the context surrounding one aspect
of the inquiry: does listening specifically to the music of Wolfgang Mozart
improve cognitive ability over listening to other types of music or silence,
evaluates the published research, and draws conclusions on the validity and
utility of the findings.
II . Overture
Researchers have long
thought that there might exist in the brain a neural network“music box”,
analogous to the so-called “language
box” of Noam Chomsky, that music might be subserved by a similar neural network
as language, and that entraining these networks could lead to improved
cognition.
The field of music psychology
has arisen out of findings in structural neurology. Mountcastle, in 1957, was
the first to posit that the cerebral cortex has a columnar organization, with
the trion as the basic structural unit (1).
A trion is an idealized mini- column of neurons with three levels of
firing activity. (1) In 1990, Leng et al
examined histological sections of temporal lobe auditory cortex with Cajal
staining techniques, and discovered that the neuroanatomy of the auditory
system has a columnar architecture similar to the trionic neural architecture
hypothesized by Mountcastle (akin to that of the visual system as first
described by Hubel and Wiesel). (2)
Leng hypothesized that this vertical stacking of auditory neurons
predisposes them to fire in certain patterns, that these patterns of firing
were quasi-stable, and that this was a logical and mathematical outcome of its
columnar cortical architecture, representing a form of “basic exchange of
mental activity.” (2) Utilizing computer
modeling and computational symmetries to create a one-to-one correspondence
between neuronal firing patterns and discrete musical pitches, they found that
the output, rather than being random noise or unorganized sound (which is what
one might intuitively expect), actually sounded more like actual music,
organized sound with the "flavor,”
to use their term, of new age music,
“Eastern” music, or music of the early Baroque (2).
Leng hypothesized that if
brain activity can sound like music, could working in reverse and observing how
the brain responds to music? (2, 3)
Might patterns in music stimulate the brain by activating similar firing
patterns of nerve clusters? (2, 3)
At the same time, a
different line of research was ongoing in Paris which would eventually align
with the research of the Leng team. Alfred Tomatis M.D. was a French-born
otolaryngologist who in the late 1980s founded the specialty of
“audiopsychophonology.” His thesis was that “the voice cannot produce what the
ear cannot hear.” (4) Using Gregorian
plainchant and several of Mozart’s five violin concerti, Tomatis used his
techniques to treat patients who could not properly vocalize, declaim on
theatrical stages, or sing in concert halls. Thomatis’ concept of “auditory
processing integration” retrained the voices of, inter alii, Maria Callas,
Gordon Sumner (Sting), Gerard Depardieu and Benjamin Luxon, resuscitating their
careers. Tomatis reported on his findings in 1991, arguing for a Mozart “effect” to explain the improvement in
these patients.(4) This was the first time the term “Mozart effect” had been used, though Tomatis did not copyright the
term.
III. Prelude
Frances Rauscher, Gordon
Shaw and Ky, of the department of psychology at the University of California,
Irvine, published a one-page paper in the October 14, 1993 issue of the journal
Nature, entitled, "Music and
Spatial Task Performance." (5) They
found that short-term listening to the complete first movement and the first
three minutes of the second movement (10 total minutes) of the Mozart two-
piano sonata in D (K.V. 448/375a) led to a short-term improvement (~ 9 points,
for about 15 minutes) in spatial-temporal tasks on a Stanford-Binet Test (paper
folding/ cutting), over the same group tested after sitting in silence, and
then after listening to “relaxation music.” (5)
The Rauscher team did not give this finding a name, nor did they
extrapolate their findings to state that Mozart’s music improved any other
aspect of cognition.
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| Mozart Sonata for two pianos in D, KV 448 Frontispiece of the Breitkopf Edition |
IV. Sonata
What is so special about the
two-piano sonata in D (K.V. 448) of Wolfgang Mozart that it was chosen for the
Rauscher study? In September 2012, in preparation for some remarks on the
Mozart effect that I presented at an October 2012 Music and Medicine Symposium
at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, I interviewed Professor
Frances Rauscher about this topic. Professor Rauscher, who is now at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison as an emeritus professor of psychology, told me
that when she and her team were organizing the Nature study at UCI in 1993, she
had asked a musicologist at her institution for a composition that was
relatively upbeat, had some repetition and was melodically relatively straightforward,
and that this was the piece chosen. Rauscher stated that. “we used the first
movement of the Mozart two-piano sonata because it has very few musical motives
that interweave in various forms throughout the movement; that it was a
two-piano sonata helped reinforce the symmetry in the music.”
I asked Dr Rauscher why her
team used both the first movement of KV 448, marked Allegro con spirito
(lively and with spirit), but also part
of the Andante (a slow talking tempo) second movement. Her response was that “we
included a portion of the second movement as a sort of "cool down"
period.” (Frances Rauscher, personal communications, 9/12/2012) The Mozart
selection the researchers chose was purposely not of one tempo, because they
wanted music that was both fast and slow. The first movement of the two-piano
sonata, in D major (two sharps), is largely comprised of tonic and dominant
chords, and has six distinct repetitive motifs. The two pianos not only echo
each other, but often play the same melody in octaves. I asked Professor
Rauscher about this seeming overkill, and she said they purposely wanted some
chordal redundancy to emphasize certain melodic themes as that would
potentially entrain better.
V. Development
In 1996, Don Campbell, a
professional musician, successfully petitioned the United states Copyright and
Trademark Office to obtain a copyright for the term “The Mozart Effect” (note the capitalization of both “Mozart” and “Effect”), and subsequently published a 1997 book entitled, The
Mozart Effect: Tapping the Power of Music to Heal the Body, Strengthen the
Spirit and Unlock the Creative Spirit. (6)
Campbell followed that up
with another book, The Mozart Effect for Children, along with dozens of related
cassettes, CDs and related workbooks. In his 1996 book, Campbell defined "The Mozart Effect" as "an
inclusive term signifying the transformational powers of music in health,
education, and well-being. It represents the general use of music to reduce
stress, depression, or anxiety; induce relaxation or sleep; activate the body;
and improve memory or awareness.”
(6) Campbell went on to claim
that “innovative and experimental uses of music and sound can improve listening
disorders, dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, autism and other mental and
physical disorders and other diseases.” (6)
The response to the Campbell
books was overwhelmingly positive. If YouTube had existed then, it could hve
been said that the books and the term The
Mozart Effect had gone "viral".
The Mozart Effect was so
popular as a concept that it became a political call- to-arms for the arts,
reaching, among other places, the Georgia state legislature, when in 1998 then
governor Zell Miller apportioned funds to buy every child born in Georgia
either a tape cassette or CD of classical music. (7)
At the same time that
Campbell was reaping profits from the cottage industry he spawned popularizing
the notion of some kind of Mozart Effect,
the Rauscher study was being subjected to an enormous amount of scrutiny, most
of it negative.
VI. Theme and Variations
On 3/1/13, I performed a
Medline search of all titles containing the terms “Mozart effect,” "The
Mozart Effect," “Mozart + spatial,”
or “Mozart + cognition.” A total of 107
distinct articles were retrieved and analyzed as to: peer-review, accepted methodology, controlled
trial, and rigor of data analysis. Most of the articles were reviews of other
works, hypotheses, single case studies, anecdotal opinion, or did not meet all
of the four critera; of the 107 articles, only six qualified for the
meta-analysis
A 1994 study by Stough et al
from Auckland, New Zealand, failed to find any relationship between the Mozart
sonata and spatial reasoning. The researchers employed Raven’s Advanced
Progressive Matrices, an accepted tool for analyzing spatial reasoning, whereas
the Rauscher group used Stanford-Binet testing. This study, while meeting the
four inclusion criteria, could not be definitely analyzed given the different
testing methodologies. (8)
In 1995, a group from SUNY
Albany replicated the Rauscher study and increased the study group to 114
subjects, with a slight older mean age than the college students in the
Rauscher study (SUNY mean age 27.3 vs Rauscher mean age 20.8). The SUNY group
found no increase in spatial-temporal reasoning, and no correlation to higher
scores and any type of classical music preference. (9)
A study by Steele et al, the
so-called Appalachian Study, also found no correlation between the music of
Mozart and increased spatial-task performance. Steele’s conclusions were that
“any cognitive improvement was transient” and more likely represented a
“practicing’ effect and a familiarity with the paper-cutting test on multiple
trials to different pre-treatment stimuli (10).
However, two separate
studies by Rideout et al, one employing EEG data and both reproducing the
methodology of the 1993 Rauscher study, confirmed the findings of a temporary
increase in spatial-task performance scores in the groups “pre-treated” with
Mozart’s music. (13, 14)
Rauscher and Shaw responded to
the spate of studies, some of which confirmed, but most of which refuted their
1993 findings, by repeating a Mozart effect
study on laboratory rats, confirming that rats pre-treated with Mozart,
learned to navigate a T- maze significantly better than rats exposed to
minimalist music (Philip Glass), white noise, or silence, and that this
increase was retained for several months. Rauscher stated that the inconsistent
results of the Mozart effect in other studies was a result of those studies
utilizing diverse subjects and different methodological designs, such as
musically disparate compositions, listening conditions, and measures. Rauscher
also reiterated that her team's 1993 Nature study specifically identified its
limitations: that the effect was transient, and limited to spatial cognition.
(12)
VII. Coda
By 1999, six years after the
Rauscher study, the scientific community had pronounced the Mozart effect
anecdotal and non-reproducible. Two articles in Nature, both entitled “Prelude
or Requiem for the Mozart effect?,” one by Kevin Steele and coworkers (15), and
the other by Christopher Chabris (16), came to the same conclusion: that the
results of the Mozart effect were
transient, and that there was no difference in spatial-temporal skills after
being pretreated, in their studies, with Mozart’s two-piano sonata, the
minimalist music of Philip Glass or silence. (15, 16) Chabris maintained that “this (Mozart)
effect, if indeed there is one, is much more readily explained by established
principles of neuropsychology, in this case, an effect on mood or arousal, than
by some new model about columnar organization of neurons and neuron firing
patterns" (16)
This could have been the
coda and the end of the interesting saga of the Mozart effect. However, further rigorous lines of inquiry have followed,
examining specific circumstances in using Mozart’s music, and music similar to
the music of Mozart: in epilepsy in some studies, and in cardiovascular health
in others. These new avenues of research have reopened the related inquiry of
whether there is a biological underpinning to the Mozart effect.
Epileptic patients who
listened to the music of Mozart, and the music of two other composers whose
style resembles that of Mozart (Johann Christian Bach and Johann Sebastian
Bach), had a statistically significant reduction in the frequency of
epileptiform activity, in comparison to the same patients when they listened to
the music of 58 other composers, including the works of Beethoven, Chopin,
Brahms and Stravinsky. (17) The authors, John Hughes and John Fino of the
University of Illinois, examined 81 musical selections of Mozart, 67 selections
of Johann Christian Bach, 67 of Johann Sebastian Bach, 39 of Chopin, as well as
148 selections from 55 other composers. The compositions were computer analyzed
to search for any distinctive aspect and to determine if there was a dominant
periodicity. Long-term periodicity (mean
= 10-60 sec, median = 30 sec) was found most often in the music of Mozart and
the two Bachs, which was significantly more often than the works of the other
composers. Long-term periodicity was found to be absent in the control music
that had no effect on epileptic activity in previous studies. Short-term
periodicities were not significantly different between the music of Mozart and
the two Bachs, versus the music of the other composers. However, at least one
distinctive aspect of the music of Mozart and the two Bachs, specifically their
long-term melodic periodicity, may resonate within the cerebral cortex and also
may relate to brain coding.” (17) Thus,
the Mozart effect could also be
termed the “J.S. Bach effect” or the
“J.C. Bach effect."
More recent evidence for the
efficacy of Mozart’s music on epileptiform frequency has confirmed the Hughes
and Fino data. In a 2011 series of experiments by Lin et al, the researchers
looked at long-term listening of Mozart’s two-piano sonata KV 448 and
epileptiform activity in children, and found that there was a significant
reduction in activity in the group “treated” with Mozart’s music. (18) The Lin
group re-confirmed their findings in 2015. (19)
Trappe et al looked at the
effect of the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Verdi, as well as heavy metal
music played by several groups, on their effect on heart rate variability. They
found that the music of these composers, but not heavy metal music, lowered
heart rate and reduced the variability of heart rhythm. (20)
There have also been peer-reviewed
articles on the use of Kv 448 in tinnitus (21), cognitive rehabilitation in the
aged (22), and on the central nervous system. (23)
Pauwels et al looked into whether
there is a link between music-generated emotion and higher level cognition.
Positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging show
that listening to pleasurable music activates cortical and subcortical cerebral
areas where emotions are processed. (24) These neurobiological effects of music
suggest that auditory stimulation evokes emotions linked to heightened arousal,
and result in temporarily enhanced performance in many cognitive domains. Music
therapy applies this arousal, offering benefits to patients by diverting their
attention from unpleasant experiences and future interventions. Music therapy has
been applied to cardiovascular disorders, cancer pain, epilepsy, depression and
dementia. Music may modulate the immune response evidenced by increasing the
activity of natural killer(NK) cells, lymphocytes and interferon-γ, as many
diseases are related to a misbalanced immune system. There is moderate level of
evidence that listening to known and preferred music decreases burden of disease
and stress by enhancing the immune system
.(24)
Verrusio and colleagues
evaluated, by electroencephalography (EEG), the effect of listening to Mozart's
KV 448 2-piano sonata or Beethoven's Für
Elise piano bagatelle, in separate groups of healthy adults, healthy
elderly, and elderly with mild cognitive impairment (MCI).(24) EEG recordings
were performed at basal rest conditions and after listening to Mozart's music
or Beethoven's music. There was an increase in the alpha band and median
frequency index of background alpha rhythm activity, (a pattern of brain wave
activity linked to memory, cognition and open mind to problem solving), with
the Mozart KV 448 in the adult group and in the group of the elderly. No
changes were observed in MCI. After listening to Beethoven’s Für Elise, no changes in EEG activity
were detected in any of the groups. They concluded that Mozart's music is able
to "activate" neuronal cortical circuits related to attentive and
cognitive functions. (25)
Studies demonstrating the effect
on Mozart's music in autistic children have demonstrated improved language skills,
augmenting their ability to communicate, participate and express non-verbally, and
develop appropriate expression of their emotions. (26)
VII. Summary
What conclusions can be
drawn from analyzing the data on the Mozart effect?
1. If there is anything that
could be called a Mozart effect, it is transient and it is specific to
spatial-temporal reasoning.
2. The Mozart effect cannot
be extrapolated to other cognitive abilities nor cognitive enhancement over
longer periods of time.
3. There is not just a
Mozart effect; there is also a
"J.C. Bach effect”, a “J.S. Bach effect," and likely, an
"effect" by other composers in classical and popular genres, whose
melodic themes happen to “align” with the periodicities of neuronal network activity.
4. Certain types of music with specific rhythms and periodicity, create an
arousal effect, and it is this arousal that creates temporary enhancement in cognitive capacity.
Whether or not this effect is a consequence of
the “aligning of neurons" is unknown. This hypothesis needs further
research.
5. Studies examining
Mozart’s music and epileptiform discharge, Mozart's music and tinnitus, and
Mozart's music and heart rate and rhythm regularity, have found a salutary and
direct correlation with Mozart's music more than silence, random noise, and the
music of other composers.
6. Despite the varied interpretation of the findings, the data underpinning the Mozart
effect has been positive, calling attention to the ability of certain genres of
music, to lower disorganized brain activity
(decrease epileptiform discharge), decrease stress, blood pressure and heart rate.
In a world increasingly
fraught with stress, anger and anxiety, the use of music, especially Mozart's
music, as both therapy and for pleasure, has been one of calmness and healing, centering us in a sonic world of consummate and felicitous harmony.
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Vincent P. de Luise, M.D. F.A.C.S. is an assistant clinical professor of ophthalmology at Yale University School of Medicine, and adjunct clinical assistant professor of ophthalmology at Weill Cornell Medical College, where he also serves on the Music and Medicine Initiative Advisory Board. A clarinetist, he performs chamber music, was the director of the Connecticut Mozart Festival in the bicentenary year of the composer's death, co-founded the annual classical music recital of the American Academy of Ophthalmology, is president of the Connecticut Summer Opera Foundation, and writes and blogs about music and the arts at A Musical Vision www.amusicalvision.blogspot.com
Vincent P. de Luise, M.D. F.A.C.S. is an assistant clinical professor of ophthalmology at Yale University School of Medicine, and adjunct clinical assistant professor of ophthalmology at Weill Cornell Medical College, where he also serves on the Music and Medicine Initiative Advisory Board. A clarinetist, he performs chamber music, was the director of the Connecticut Mozart Festival in the bicentenary year of the composer's death, co-founded the annual classical music recital of the American Academy of Ophthalmology, is president of the Connecticut Summer Opera Foundation, and writes and blogs about music and the arts at A Musical Vision www.amusicalvision.blogspot.com
