The Mozart Effect

in 1991 an ear nose and throat doctor by the name of alfred a tomatis published a book called porqua mozart or why mozart where he documented his experiments while trying to cure ailments like dyslexia add autism other learning disabilities sensory processing issues along with general motor skill difficulties as well as fighting depression improving on-the-job performance making somebody more creative and even giving the listener the ability to learn foreign languages faster tomotis believed that a number of these issues began while the ear was forming in the womb and if that person's ear had any issues developing properly then the individual wouldn't be able to hear their mother's voice and would end up developing communication issues which tomatoes believed to be the potential cause of all these ailments i'm not gonna lie here i don't really understand all this work mostly because it's not true and it's all been disproven but in 1993 there was a study by rauscher shaw and kai he who tested the effects of listening to mozart on an individual's spatial reasoning the researchers gave the participants the spatial reasoning portion of an iq test while under three conditions first the control a subject would take the test in complete silence second the subject would take the test while listening to verbal relaxation instructions which i don't really know what that means and third they had the subject take the test while listening to mozart's sonata for two pianos in d major they found that the individuals who took the test while listening to mozart would generally score higher however the effects that mozart's music had on the subjects were temporary they would only last while the subject was listening to mozart and even then the beneficial aspects of mozart would only last about 15 minutes but in 1994 a new york times music columnist by the name of alex ross wrote an article stating that researchers had determined that listening to mozart actually makes you smarter at which point a lot of people started to actually believe that listening to mozart would result in a general increase in iq but it wasn't till 1997 when don campbell published a book called the mozart effect tapping the power of music to heal the body strengthen the mind and unlock the creative spirit and in this book he talked about how music composed by mozart can have general benefits to mental function and overall increase to your iq and that you have to play mozart for your baby so that you can benefit their neurological development and this is really frustrating because aspects of these studies are true and come from the right place but none of these individual studies have really honed in on what's happening in the brain and at the same time there's some serious cultural exploits taking place here that would make a story like this not only believable but extremely profitable especially in america see america has always had this fascination with europe like how many times have you heard of a college student taking a semester to travel around europe and then they come back and suddenly they're all enlightened and high and mighty well that idea goes back to the 1800s america way back when if you wanted to be educated especially in the arts you had to travel to europe and learn from the european masters that meant that if you were part of the upper echelons of society you probably spoke more than one language had a degree from a european college and had pen pals in europe anything else about mr candy that i should know before i meet him yes he is a bit of a francophile what civilized people are and and he prefers mature candy to mr candy you see he doesn't speak french don't speak french to him it'll embarrass him but after the world wars and all of europe bombed itself into smithereens america as well as all the other former european colonies i.e the rest of the planet kind of took one long look at europe and started to question the cultural superiority that europe had held over the world for the last few hundred years at which point you start seeing more and more people staying in the states to go to school and along with the massive economic boom of the 1950s you start to see new york and la become massive cultural centers of the world but we still have that highly romanticized idea of europe like just think about how crazy people go for the renaissance festival or like how a lot of people in the states will use the eiffel tower as a romantic symbol so if you take a prolific european composer it'd be pretty easy to convince a lot of people that there's something super high class and special about listening to someone like mozart and mozart was no slack he was a child prodigy and toured all over europe giving concerts while he was still a child he wrote an insane amount of music over the course of his very short life and he was one of the first freelance composers who ever lived one time when he was 14 he listened to gregorio allegri's misery miss sarah ray mystere he listened to a very important piece of music at the sistine chapel on easter it was a special piece that they performed on easter and back then you could only perform a piece if you had the score and the catholic church kept this score for this piece under lock and key so the only way you'd be able to hear this piece is if you were at the sistine chapel on easter well while on tour the 14 year old mozart heard the whole piece and that night when he couldn't sleep he wrote down the entire 15 minute piece of music note for note from memory the following day he returned to the second concert to make sure that all the notes were correct and sure enough there wasn't a single mistake now since mozart had recreated the score the piece wasn't special anymore the secret was out mozart was kind of like the first ever musical pirate but instead of excommunicating him pope clement xiv awarded mozart the order of the golden spur which i think technically makes mozart like a catholic knight or something i don't know so mozart was totally a musical badass which makes sense as to why so many people might think that his music has some sort of supernatural power to it but you have to realize that this is the same guy who had a romantic relationship with his cousin had a serious poop fetish like used to send really gross letters to his cousin like as a romantic gesture and she'd be really gross and send some letters back but then mozart also sent like poop letters to his dad and then mozart got back at his crush by marrying her little sister instead of his cousin and they stayed married until he died so is that the guy you want being the role model for your kids i don't know but as far as classical composers go haydn really made more progress for the world of music over the course of his lifetime i mean we don't call him the father of the symphony for nothing but i'm getting distracted okay like i said the most frustrating part about this phenomenon that we call the mozart effect is that it actually works listening to music composed by mozart can actually make you smarter and it's all related to this picture twice a year right around finals week i have to see this stupid picture on reddit claiming that you should study while listening to video game soundtracks because there's something about video game soundtracks that provides a stimulating background that doesn't mess with your concentration i don't know what a stimulating background soundtrack means i don't know how to write stimulating background music and if any type of music is supposed to just sit in the background then what's the point of having it but the worst part about this picture is an element of it is actually true so buckle in because we're gonna have to get into some neuroanatomy okay so there are these two areas of your brain called the broca's and wernicke's areas the broca's area is here and it's responsible for speech production and the wernicke's area is here and it's responsible for speech comprehension if either of these areas are damaged by stroke or by some traumatic injury it leads to a condition called aphasia a person with broca's aphasia will understand language but will have difficulty producing the words this is called expressive aphasia and what did you used to do um well um worked um autodesk um seven seven sales sales and worldwide and very good yeah and a person with wernicke's aphasia will be able to produce words but they might not maintain any type of meaning this is called fluent aphasia what are you doing today we stayed with the water over here at the moment and talked with the people for them over there they're diving for them at the moment without saving the moment healed water very soon for him with luck for him this is actually the backbone of a lot of music therapy music therapists will use a variety of techniques to help a patient use other parts of their brain to compensate for what has been damaged and help them regain their ability to communicate now it's really important to understand the broker and wernicke's areas and what they do because they play a key role in something called sub-vocalization sub-vocalization is what your brain does when you read a book in short it's the voice that you hear in your mind when you're reading a book or thinking to yourself when that word in that book makes a sound in your head it's your broken wernicke areas producing that sound but if there's someone talking to you it overloads those areas of your brain and your brain is forced to pick only one task to work on that's why libraries are quiet if people are talking around you and you can tune into their conversation your brain literally isn't powerful enough to read and listen to the conversations happening around you unless you can focus hard enough and have your subvocalized voice be louder than the people around you that's why coffee shops are so nice for studying and focusing there's already so much noise that your brain can't focus on any single conversation so you can focus on that subvocalized voice in your head but all of that goes out the window when you put in your earbuds and start blasting taylor swift let's have a test here's a stock sound of a coffee house that i found you can pick out my voice super easily because you can't really tune into the other noises that's why something like rain is so peaceful it creates a consistent backdrop for your inner voice but if i start playing taylor swift suddenly it's a nightmare to try and focus on my voice the relative volume doesn't really matter it's just too difficult to keep track of both things so that psy you just let out when i turned off the music was because you were taxing that part of your brain and it was stressing you out so if a game wants you to try and focus on a puzzle they won't be playing music with lyrics in fact music with lyrics will only appear in cut scenes where you aren't really doing anything or maybe those lyrics appear in a language that you don't understand so it just sounds like voice is singing and it won't interrupt the dialogue so if you're in a room trying to solve puzzles maybe talking to the test taker will constantly break their focus making it difficult for them to think and taking the test in absolute silence might bring more attention to the test taking conditions and have every cough and dropped pencil break their focus meaning that listening to music that doesn't have lyrics that happens to be composed by mozart would allow them to focus better and maintain their concentration and ultimately increase their test scores so when you look online and find charts that correlate your favorite type of music and the average sat score and you see that the highest test scores all happen to listen to beethoven maybe it's the fact that those kids can focus on their studies because they're listening to music that doesn't have lyrics or maybe it's because they have the type of parents who are so desperate to give their kid an edge on the sats and get into a good college that they force their kid to listen to mozart or beethoven because a news article or a chart on the internet said that it might give their kid an edge but maybe those parents are also the types who would buy their kids practice tests and send them off to private tutors maybe these parents are so desperate for their kids to succeed that they go as far as to micromanage what music their kids are allowed to listen to so if you're trying to study or you really have to focus on something listening to music that doesn't contain lyrics or at the very least contains lyrics in a language that you don't understand can help you eliminate any potential distractions and in turn maybe that helps you retain more information for that next test and you end up getting a higher grade all because of what music you were listening to so can listening to music composed by mozart make you smarter yes but by that logic so can listening to all the battle themes from the final fantasy series and the soundtrack to the dark knight

Channel: Sideways

Views: 287,717

Rating: 4.9451389 out of 5

Keywords: Mozart, The Mozart Effect, Aphasia, Wernicke, Broca, Campbell, Europe, Smarter, Smart, IQ, Spatial, Reasoning, Spatial Reasoning, Study, Test, Beethoven, Haydn

Id: qMl4gLWGM-0

Length: 11min 23sec (683 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 16 2017