(Reuters) Chicago-
LISTENING to Mozart boosts your brainpower. At least that's the theory that sent a certain CD soaring to the top of the classical bestsellers list on Internet bookstore Amazon.com. Music for The Mozart Effect Vol 1-Strengthen the Mind also cracked Billboard magazine's classical top ten, where it was joined by a second disc, The Mozart Effect: Music for Children Vol 1-Tune Up Your Mind.
The excitement started six years ago when researchers reported that people scored better on a standard IQ test after listening to Mozart. But last summer, this "Mozart Effect" suffered a setback when several skeptics repeated the original study but failed to find any improvement. Studies yet to be published may help clear up this problem. At the University of Illinois Medical Center, neurologist John Hughes and a musicologist colleague have analyzed hundreds of compositions by Mozart, Chopin and 55 other composers. They devised a scale that scores how often the music's loudness rises and falls in surges of 10 seconds or longer.
Minimalist music by the composer Philip Glass and pop tunes scored among the lowest on this measure, he found, with Mozart scoring two to three times higher. Hughes predicts that sequences repeating regularly every 20 to 30 seconds may trigger the strongest response in the brain, because many functions of the central nervous system, such as the onset of sleep and brain wave patterns, also occur in 30-second cycles. And of all the music analyzed, Mozart most often peaks every 30 seconds, Hughes found. Results such as these may help predict which pieces of music have the strongest effect on the brain, says Hughes, who hopes to begin testing brain response soon.
Even stronger support for Mozart's effect on the brain comes from other studies. Rauscher, for example, subjected 30 rats to 12 hours of the Sonata in D daily for over two months and compared results against various control groups. These rats ran a maze an average of 27 per cent faster and with 37 per cent fewer errors than 80 other rats raised with white noise or in silence, she found, a group raised with minimalist and popular music groups slightly slower than the silent / white noise control. Interestingly, a group raised on an aural diet of Hank Williams Sr. scored 29% faster and 41% fewer errors than the white noise control. And this improvement can't be due to enjoyment arousal, because rats have no emotional response to either Mozart or Williams. Instead, the study suggests a neurological basis for the Mozart Effect, says Rauscher.
