Have you ever heard of the Mozart effect? The naive idea that if you make your baby listen to classical music he or she will turn into a little genius?
The journal ‘Intelligence’ has the results of the largest, most comprehensive analysis (nearly 40 studies, over 3000 subjects) on the supposed Mozart effect and the study shows that it does not really exist. Sorry!
The article, entitled ‘Mozart Effect, Schmozart Effect’, concludes ‘there is little evidence left for a specific, performance-enhancing Mozart effect’.
But I’m sure people will still believe it, because it is a nice myth, and people will always want to have myths like that.
But the truth is nice too, and if you really want to know about music and the brain, Oliver Sacks has some fascinating stories. He is this famous neurobiologist who studied, among many other things, the brain on music.
He says that our musical tastes depend largely on the music we are exposed to during our childhood and youth, but also rely on associations, experiences, emotions we link to a certain kind of music. The music we enjoy, the one that gives us goose bumps, activates the reward system in the brain, the same part that is activated by food, sex or drugs.
And music is an important part of our life since he said that the part of the brain involved in the perception and memory of music is larger than the one involved with language! So some people who have lost their ability to speak a language have not lost their ability to sing lyrics! Since they are embedded in music… it is how deep the music is rooted in our brain! Even people with Alzheimer’s disease, deep amnesia, or dementia respond to music. May be music was present before language, that’s what they say anyway…
Oh and there is even more, some people who have terrible incessant epileptic seizures or other neurological disorders such as Tourette syndrome, see them stop when they play music, amazing stuff!
But there are some rare people who have a strange defect called amusia, they can’t recognize a tune from another, they are deaf to rhythm and melody, it is just intelligible noise, like ‘hearing pots and pans thrown around in the kitchen’. I pity these people greatly.
I suppose all this says how important music is for us, humans, we are all so high on the sound.