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Saturday, July 21, 2001 Mozart on the brain may be good for youBy ANNE GEGGIS DAYTONA BEACH — Listening to classical music not only pleases the ears -- it's an indulgence for the whole brain, according to a nationally known researcher who spoke Friday. Hope for raising American students' sagging math scores and soothing the symptoms of epileptics and Alzheimer's patients with the strains of Mozart's work was raised at a talk given by Gordon Shaw, a physics professor emeritus from the University of California-Irvine. Shaw, also the founder of the Music Intelligence Neural Development Institute, has done experiments that showed that 3-year-olds given keyboard and piano training were better at math than those who weren't. Another experiment showed that college students who listened to Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D major could complete a puzzle better than the control group that didn't. These findings, dubbed "the Mozart Effect," caused an immediate sensation when they were introduced in 1993. It prompted the governors of Tennessee and Georgia to pass out a Mozart compact disc to every newborn, for example. However, the science has since come under fire -- no one has been able to replicate the experimental findings of Shaw and his followers, crit ics have charged. But Shaw's presentation -- co- sponsored by the Florida International Festival and Halifax Medical Center -- appeared to excite medical professionals, educators and members of the public who attended his hour-long talk Friday. "The potentials there are just amazing," said Jane Kwilecki, a clincial nurse specialist in the intensive surgical care unit of Halifax. She was interested in exploring music as a possible therapy for brain injury; she and Shaw exchanged business cards. "It's thought-provoking and creates a lot more questions than answers, actually," she said. Shaw, who will sign books today and give a pre-concert talk Sunday, suggests that perhaps certain kinds of music mirrors an internal neural language, which would explain why Mozart was composing at the age of 4 without changing a note. Hearing this certain kind of music fires up the ability of the brain to do spatial-temporal reasoning -- the kind of reasoning that traditionally has been neglected in the language-based, mathematical instruction found in American schools, he said. "It's not an emotional thing," Shaw said. "The music is affecting the basic neural circuits in the cortex." Dr. Carl Lentz, an area plastic surgeon, wanted to know: "Is it the beat, the rhythm, or what?" Shaw said he doesn't know; his associates have found that Beethoven's "Fuer Elise" fires up brain waves at the same rate as popular music for reasons that still elude researchers, Shaw said. "We're just at the beginning of understanding this," he said. Lentz, however, was thrilled with the presentation: "This is the most fascinating thing I've ever seen. This is like a fresh wind blowing through the country." Shaw said he believes that the attacks on his research are a result of people misunderstanding it. And besides, "so far no one has detected any negative side effects from listening to Mozart," he said. On the Web: |
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