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UNIVERSITY OF BUCHAREST
FACULTY OF PHYSICS Guest
2024-11-22 1:33 |
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Conference: Bucharest University Faculty of Physics 2012 Meeting
Section: Biophysics; Medical Physics
Title:
The mozart effect revisited
Authors:
R. MUTIHAC
Affiliation:
University of Bucharest, Bucharest 077125, ROMANIA
Walter Reed Army Institute, Silver Spring, MD 20910, USA
National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA
E-mail
radu.mutihac@nih.gov
Keywords:
Mozart, piano sonata, IQ, neural substrate,
Abstract:
Rauscher et al. (Nature, 1993) first coined the term "Mozart effect" referring to a temporary enhancement of spatial-temporal reasoning of college students after listening (~10 min) to K.448 Mozart piano sonata versus listening to relaxation tapes or silence. Spatial-temporal reasoning in psychology defines the ability to visualize spatial patterns and mentally manipulate them over a time-ordered sequence of spatial transformations. An increase of scores equivalent to 8-9 IQ points was reported in 36 students when running subtests of the Stanford-Binet Scale of Intelligence immediately after audition (< 15 min).Music evokes thoughts and mental imagery generating emotions and supporting memory and/or cognition. Motivated by predictions of a cortex structured neural model, the behavioral experiment suggested that Mozart’s music was in tune with subjects` brain. A possible explanation is given by dopamine releasing in the right brain hemisphere. The right hemisphere controls artistic creativity and language whereas the left one controls analytical thinking and working with numbers. Nevertheless, Steele et al. (1999) showed that there is little evidence for a direct effect of music exposure on reasoning ability.Here, inferences on how the brain works during spontaneous creativity/improvisation were drawn from fMRI data. All scans revealed that spontaneous improvisation was associated with specific patterns of activation and deactivation mainly in the prefrontal cortex, the sensorimotor area, and the limbic regions. The medial prefrontal cortex was actively involved in retrieving memories suggesting that it serves as an index of internally motivated behavior. No single creative area of the brain exists, rather a strong and consistent pattern of activity throughout the brain that enables creativity was disclosed. Yet no influence of immediate prior experience nor any dependence on the task complexity were statistically evidenced. To conclude our behavioral experiments: you may enjoy the music of Mozart but do not expect to get smarter.
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