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Mozart gives rats an edge in maze
By Richard a. Knox, Globe Staff, 08/10/98
Humans aren't the only mammals who benefit from the famous ``Mozart
effect'' - better performance on certain intelligence tests after
listening to the 18th-century composer's music. So do rats.
The researchers who demonstrated the Mozart effect in preschoolers and
college students have now found that rats raised in a nightly sound
bath of a Mozart piano sonata (K. 448) learned to run mazes faster and
with fewer errors compared to genetically identical animals exposed to
the repetitive contemporary music of Philip Glass, or to contentless
``white noise.''
For instance, the Mozart-exposed rodents ran the maze in 35 seconds on
average, compared to 50 seconds for the ones who listened to Glass and
44 seconds to the white noise group. They also learned the right route
through the maze faster.
``The work has strong implications for education and enrichment
programs, and can potentially inform scientists about the relative
contributions of biology and experience to human intelligence,''
Frances H. Rauscher and her colleagues at the University of Wisconsin
write in the July Neurological Research.
The discovery adds to an accumulating body of evidence indicating that
the brain is ``wired'' to respond to music - at least some music - and
that there is overlap between brain areas specialized for music
perception and those that carry out spatial tasks. Exercising these
areas with music, it appears, carries over in better performance on
tests of spatial ability.
In earlier tests with college students, those who listened to the same
Mozart sonata scored higher on spatial intelligence tests but the
effect lasted only 10 to 15 minutes.
A separate set of experiments with pre-schoolers showed that those
with musical training scored higher on spatial tests than those with
other kinds of training or no training. In that case, musical training
had somewhat longer-lasting effects. George Governor Zell Miller is so
taken with the ``Mozart effect'' that he proposed earlier this year
that the state send a classical-music tape or CD to the home of every
new-born child.
But the rats, which were exposed to Mozart in utero and every night
for the first 60 days of their life, apparently had changes in their
neural machinery that persisted hours after their last dose of Mozart.
One scientist familiar with the work, Gordon Shaw of the University of
California at Irvine, said it suggests that certain kinds of music
``may be tapping into the internal neural structure of the cortex,''
the gray matter in mammals' brains where thinking takes place.
Shaw was delighted by the unexpected finding that rats have at least
some of the neural equipment to respond to complex music.
Beyond the curiosity of the finding, it opens up a realm of animal
experiments that could lead scientists to understand the brain
mechanisms that underlie both music perception and spatial reasoning -
a cognitive ability involved in such diverse fields as mathematics,
architecture, visual arts, and navigation.
Ethics prohibit researchers from putting electrodes into humans'
brains to discover what neurons ``light up'' when listening to music
or performing spatial tasks. But they could probe an animal's brain to
see what neurons fire while it is exposed to music or running a maze.
Rauscher's discovery of the Mozart effect has created a small industry
of authors and consultants trying to sell ambitious parents on the
benefits of exposing their tots - or even fetuses - to the master's
music. But Shaw, who collaborated in the early experiments, said the
researchers never meant to suggest that Mozart's music was somehow
uniquely beneficial.
``We initially picked Mozart because, composing at the age of three,
he would write down whole pieces of music without changing a note,''
Shaw said. ``We figured if anyone was exploring that natural inherent
mechanism in the brain, it might be Mozart. But I have a post-doctoral
fellow who is very anxious to try this with other classical
composers.''
This story ran on page C02 of the Boston Globe on 08/10/98. ©
Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company.
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