The Power Of Mozart

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Behind much of this enterprise is a U.S. musician named Don Campbell, who is not a scientist and had nothing to do with the original research, but who quickly trademarked the term "Mozart effect," and has written two best-selling books on the subject and compiled more than a dozen CDs. "In an instant, music can uplift our soul. It awakens within us the spirit of prayer, compassion and love," he writes. "It clears our minds and has been known to make us smarter."

Rauscher is both bemused and sometimes amused by such rank commercialization. "At least somebody managed to make money out of it," she says. But she bristles at the way her findings are misrepresented. "Nobody ever said listening to Mozart makes you smarter," she complains, pointing out that her research showed only a temporary and limited improvement in the student's spatial reasoning, rather than a sustained and general increase in IQ. Today, she's even revising her own initial conclusions in the light of subsequent research by others, working on a book tentatively titled Music and the Mind Beyond the Mozart Effect. Listening to Mozart, she now reckons, may not be as important for the brain as the general sense of mood of arousal brought about by doing something that is enjoyable. Campbell, who is based in Colorado, isn't fazed by her attitude, nor by the open scorn he encounters in the academic community. "I don't think we can prove anything, but we can't disprove it either," he says. "To be most honest, we don't understand why music has such a powerful influence on the brain."

He has a point. Scientific studies show that many different areas of the brain are activated when a person listens to music. There's also some overlap between the areas of the brain most responsive to music and those used in spatial reasoning. But beyond that, there's little certainty as to why some pieces of music stimulate more than others — and even less understanding of music's sometimes soothing effects.

Glenn Schellenberg, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto at Mississauga, built on Rauscher's study by comparing the effects of a happy-sounding Mozart piece to a sad-sounding Albinoni piece, and then testing to see if music by the British rock band Blur had a bigger impact. (The answer is yes, among 10- and 11-year-old boys). At one point he even did research that pitted Mozart's music against a Stephen King story. His conclusion: listeners who preferred Mozart performed better after listening to Mozart than to the story. Listeners who preferred Stephen King did better after the story. Such findings are in line with those of neurosurgeons who have long tracked the effect of various stimulants, including music and drugs, on the brain's electrical discharge patterns. A growing volume of research suggests that music may hardwire the brain, building links between the two hemispheres. Exactly how this process works is still unclear, but such brain stimulation can lead to peaks of performance and awareness.

Why should Mozart's music be the focal point of this debate, rather than other classical composers such as Bach, Beethoven or Chopin? Many sounds, from Hindu chanting to the noise of the surf breaking on a shore, are believed to be therapeutic.

As for classical music, Gérard Mortier, the director of the Paris opera, is one of many who reckons that Mozart isn't the only composer who soothes. "You find the most appropriate music for the pathology," Mortier says. "For some people it might be [Johann Sebastian Bach's] 'Goldberg' Variations. For others it might be the second act of [Richard Wagner's] Tristan and Isolde. For a third it could be a Schubert quartet, and for another it's Mozart."

Still, John Hughes reckons Mozart yields the best results. He's a neurologist at the University of Illinois Medical Center who specializes in epilepsy. One day a colleague handed him a tape of the same Mozart sonata that Rauscher used in her studies. The next morning, he tried it out on a patient in a coma, and was stunned to find that it substantially reduced the frequency of seizures. He followed up with a series of studies on 36 patients; 29 of them responded in the same way to the music. "There's no question about it, about 80% of the time it has a beneficial effect on seizures," he says. That's when he started testing other classical music on patients, only to find that Mozart was consistently the most effective on his epileptic patients.

The key, he believes, lies in the way Mozart repeated his melodies. "He turned a melodic line upside down and inside out. That gave people something interesting to listen to. Our brain loves pattern." Some of Bach's music scored highly, as did works by Mendelssohn and Haydn. But Mozart's musical sequences tend to repeat regularly every 20-30 seconds, which is about the same length of time as brain-wave patterns and other functions of the central nervous system. His conclusion is that the frequency of patterns in Mozart's music counteracts irregular firing patterns of epilepsy patients. Unlike the IQ tests, Hughes says, the response he measured has nothing to do with theories of mood and arousal: "Most of my patients are in a coma so you couldn't explain it as, 'I feel better so I perform better.' This is a direct effect on the brain."