Do you think this is legit, or a scheme to sell books, CDs and lecture series?12 responses total.
I'm inclined to be *extremely* skeptical..
There was a study - apparently a fairly legitimate one, too - which connected certain kinds of music with better test scores. The catch was, it didn't matter what music you'd been listening to when you were 3 years old, or what music you'd been listening to when you studied for the test - all that mattered, in this study, was the music you'd been listening to a half-hour or so before you took the test. (Or so I remember, at least. If anyone has actual information about this study, and not just reccollections of newspaper articles, feel free to tell me I'm full of shit).
Dan's more or less on it. I don't have the source, but a university conducted a test with a specific Mozart piece and found that spatial reasoning was increased temporarily-- for about 15 mins, I think. Someone needs to do a little research, I suppose.
However financial reasoning went to pot (as shown by Mozart's life).
Okay, now I'm hearing mention of _another_ study that points to music _lessons_ early in life as a way of raising mathematical ability. Someday when I have some free time I gues I'm gonna have to track some of these studies down....
A data point, albeit purely anecdotal: I started piano lessons at age 5 and have a Ph.D. in mathematics. (Always liked Mozart too.)
I regard the claim as still unproven, but not at all implausible. Music can have such an enormous impact on one's emotional state. I would not be surprised if one's emotional state in turn affected one's ability to learn or to think clearly. As for infants, they are reported to be highly succeptible to stimulus. Surely the music they're listening to will affect the hard- wiring of their little brains. That said, I find somewhere between obnoxious and mendacious the notion of marketing CDs of Mozart to parents with a virtual guarantee that they'll turn the children into little Einsteins.
I never kept up with my piano lessons, which is obviously why I never earned a Ph.D. in mathematics.. In fact I went through quite a number of musical instruments trying to find one I liked playing enough to practice. Eventually I reached the conclusion that it wasn't any property of the instruments that was at fault..
I didn't keep up with my violin lessons, but my career has been in applied mathematical modeling. Well, I did build a harpsichord later in life.....
The only scientific findings that I remember reading about was that having listened to a particular work by Mozart, spatial reasoning in tested subjects increased significantly (almost 60%, I think)-- but the effect was VERY temporary-- only about 15 mins.
One wonders if the length of the Mozart work makes any difference to the length of the effect - if you listen to "Don Giovanni" do you have any more lasting effects than if you listen to the "Turkish Rondo"? Perhaps it also affects the type of spatial reasoning as well. A person listening to the "Turkish Rondo" might do better on a test question concerning the borders of the Ottoman Empire, while a person listening to "Don Giovanni" might do better with, er, human anatomy? <joke, d---e, joke!>
There was a newspaper article in the past couple of days reporting that other studies found no effect of Mozart on any (unrelated) learning task. So, there is a counter data point. Obviously, more work is needed.....
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