Now the co-discoverer of the "Mozart effect," Dr. Gordon Shaw, shows how music can help us understand how the brain works and how music may enhance how we think, reason and create. In this landmark book, he includes key information about his original research, plus the latest findings about the effect of music from his own research and that of other scientists around the world. Keeping Mozart in MIND is written in a style that makes this information accessible to not only researchers and clinicians, but also educators and parents. The book is accompanied by a CD-ROM demonstration of STAR (Spatial-Temporal Animation Reasoning), an interactive software program that was used in combination with piano lessons in a recent study to help teach difficult math concepts to young children, and a recording of the first movement of Mozart's sonata for two pianos in D major, K.448, the sonata that induces the "Mozart effect."
The discoverer of the "Mozart effect" shows that music really does enhance learning:
- Part I gives the essential ideas of Dr. Shaw's theme that music can enhance our ability to think and reason.
- Part II contains the more technical aspects of how music enhances learning, made readable and accessible to everyone.
- Part III contains all the details of the dramatic behavior experiments that were performed with humans involving music.
- Part IV presents the results and proposed studies that are crucial to the detailed scientific understanding of what is happening in the brain.
- Part V presents the future of music as an influence upon higher brain function.
CD-ROM: Each book includes a free CD-ROM which introduces the reader to STAR (Spatial-Temporal Animation Reasoning), an interactive software program that teaches difficult math concepts such as fractions, proportions, symmetry and object manipulation to children. This special descriptive version of STAR. includes interactive sample versions, as well as explanations, of many of the games and levels that were used in combination with piano lessons to boost children's performance on spatial-temporal math problems.
The CD also showcases Murray Perahia and Radu Lupu's outstanding and precise performance of the first movement of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, K.448. This famous recording was the one used in Dr. Shaw's original "Mozart effect" study and all his subsequent research. Contact Sony Classical Entertainment for the full length recording by these performers.
Audience: Researchers and clinicians in neuroscience and psychology; music teachers, math teachers, and other educators; learning specialists; parents and other laypersons interested in the effect of music on learning.
Excerpts
The following are excerpts from the last chapter in Gordon Shaw's book Keeping Mozart in MIND. The original book was released in September 1999 by Academic Press.
FIGURE 23.1: Pieces of brain puzzle in our ongoing study of "Music as a
window into higher brain function." I have discussed all thirteen of them in
this book and shown you how they all fit together.
THE THIRTEEN PIECES IN OUR BRAIN PUZZLE FIT
As I noted in the Prologue, these thirteen pieces in the scientific puzzle that I call "Music as a window into higher brain function" will each require much further research. However, they all fit together. For example, there are six separate Mozart effect puzzle pieces, all done in different labs. Together with the trion model predictions, these six experimental pieces on the Mozart effect, all from different perspectives and techniques, form an impressive cluster of results that support each other:
- (b) college student behavioral studies from my lab at U.C. Irvine;
- (c ) EEG coherence studies from the University of Vienna;
- (g) Alzheimer studies from the lab of Carl Cotman at U.C. Irvine
- (h) rat studies from the lab of Fran Rauscher at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh;
- (i) epilepsy studies from the lab of John Hughes at the University of Illinois, Chicago; and
- (j) fMRI studies from the lab of Orhan Nalcioglu at U.C. Irvine.
It is now no longer appropriate to consider these results as separate phenomena. I hope you now agree with me that they all fit into a coherent picture.
ROLE OF MUSIC TRAINING AND S.T.A.R. TRAINING IN OUR SCHOOLS
Now back to our program. Piano keyboard training in conjunction with the spatial-temporal math software STAR was dramatically successful in teaching proportional math and fractions in our study involving 2nd grade children [12].
Amy Graziano, Matthew Peterson, and I found that children at the inner-city 95th St. School in Los Angeles, when given 4 months of piano keyboard training along with the STAR training scored a striking 27% higher on proportional math and fractions than children given a control training along with the STAR training.
Proportional math is usually introduced during the 6th grade and has proved to be enormously difficult to teach most children using the usual language analytic methods. Not only is proportional math crucial for all college-level science, but it is the first academic hurdle that requires children to grasp underlying concepts before they can master the material. Rote learning simply does not work. Children who do not master these areas of math are essentially ruled out of future competition for many high-tech jobs. Of course not all children should go into high-tech fields, but they should not be out of the running already in elementary school.
My dream is that the necessary further scientific studies, optimization studies for the music training, and large-scale expansion of STAR into all grades from preschool to college be done in parallel as well as sequentially. There is no supportable reason why generations of children should be written off and deprived of the best education in math and science. I believe that many middle-class parents who read this book will make sure their children get the benefits of music training and STAR training even if it is not provided in school. This will just widen the educational gap between children from low and high demographic homes. The consequences of this entirely avoidable inequality in math and science performance are simply unacceptable in the U.S.
ROLE OF MUSIC IN CHILD BRAIN DEVELOPMENT
I conclude with how music might enhance child brain development, since it is perhaps the most important area in which science can make a positive impact. If I controlled science spending,
I would put 10 billion dollars into a 10-year program to improve our understanding of infant brain development and to learn how to optimize the child's neural hardware for thinking and reasoning. These children will determine the world's future. Let's give them the opportunity to reach their potential.
This high level of funding would ensure that the best and brightest scientists would strongly consider devoting their energies to this enormously important field. I hope that this book has convinced you that it is not enough to simple know that the infant brain is complex and develops rapidly. The newborn infant brain is not a blank slate. We must learn what active inputs at each developmental stage will generate the most effective enhancement of brain function.
Clearly, the role of music in the spatial-temporal reasoning of infants and primates deserves much more study. My dream is that a simpler version of STAR designed specifically for infants and primates--MicroSTAR.--will play a pivotal role in both evaluating and enhancing the role of music. Matthew Peterson, Mark Bodner, and I are now in the process of developing a spatial-temporal version of MicroSTAR.
I have a special interest in this because of the many commercial and political distortions of the Mozart effect that are being aimed at eager parents. As mentioned earlier, one of the reasons that I wrote this book was to counteract the numerous misuses of our research. I discussed these cases in the Prologue.
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