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Seminar to explore As a cultural phenomenon, the Mozart Effect seems to have fallen on hard times, a victim of overhype and the scientific backlash that accompanied it. The simple idea behind the M.E. -- that exposure to certain pieces of classical music might improve the cognitive abilities of babies and children -- was once the darling of the press, a conceptual celebrity that caught the attention of everyone from Oprah to CNN.
music effect
The '90s parenting fad has waned,
but research continues to point
to a music-learning linkBy Scott Vogel
svogel@starbulletin.comPushy parents, anxious to ease the transition from training pants to Ivy League, bought M.E. books and CDs by the bushel. "Music for the Mozart Effect: Vol. 1 -- Strengthen the Mind" reached the top 10 of Billboard's classical chart in the late '90s, and CDs like "Baroque for Baby" were often tucked between diaper coupons and free issues of "Parents" in the gift pack new moms received upon leaving the hospital.
No one ever proved such CDs were snake oil. In fact, a growing body of research suggests music does affect the brain in significant, potentially therapeutic ways. But the experience of listening to (or performing) music is such a complex one that its benefits are just beginning to be understood.
"I think it does a lot of things," says Arthur Harvey, an assistant professor of music at the University of Hawaii, who will lead a free seminar, "Using Music to Enhance Learning at Any Age," at the Hilton Hawaiian Village Saturday.
"The reason why music is so effective at causing changes is that it has an emotional pleasure element to it. And that's critical, because we know that when emotions and motivation and feeling are affected, we tend to learn and remember much more for the long-term, and much faster actually. And that's illustrated often in how quickly young people can learn pop songs in one or two hearings as they're driving."
What: Dr. Arthur Harvey seminar, presented by the Hawaii Medical Service Association Music and learning
When: 9 a.m. Saturday
Where: Hilton Hawaiian Village, Coral Ballroom
Cost: Free, reservations suggested
Call: 948-6398
Another key element of the music-while-driving experience is the relaxed state it induces, which is itself conducive to learning. "The brain wave state that anybody is in determines significantly how effectively they learn, retain and recall information," says Harvey. "Music has the ability to change brain wave states very efficiently, from beta to alpha, even to theta," and it's via this shifting of wave states that learning is enhanced.
And who hasn't had the experience of hearing a song and then feeling mentally transported to a time and place they haven't thought about in decades? Music, Harvey, says, is a powerful memory device.
"With the song is associated an image, an experience, emotions and feeling. Everybody teaches the alphabet with music, but you can also teach the capitols of states, you can teach conjugation of verbs, you can teach multiplication tables, you can teach social habits, you can teach language."
Harvey grew up in a minister's home and remembers the books of the Bible being taught via song. "So if somebody said, 'well, where is the book of Job?' You'd see students either sing out loud or quietly until they got to where Job was."
It was the consideration of his own precociousness -- a high school diploma at 15, a college degree at 19 -- that first led Harvey, now 62, to posit a connection between music and the brain. He began piano and organ studies at age 4, picked up the trombone at 7, and "because I found music personally motivating and rewarding, and was convinced that it (had) helped in my own cognitive growth, as the years went on in my schooling, I decided I would try to answer some questions: why does music affect us the way it does, both emotionally and intellectually and physically?"
Like Gordon Shaw and Frances Rauscher, the California researchers who first put the Mozart Effect on the cultural map, Harvey believes that for most, playing an instrument produces greater cognitive benefits than simply listening to music (sorry, buying tapes for tots isn't enough) and the benefits aren't limited to children.
In a University of Louisville Medical School study of retired nuns in two nursing homes he introduced the playing of recorders and other instruments (in one group), and "this was the only change in their environment." He discovered "statistically valid improvement in memory function. Just by playing music and reading notes and moving fingers with eye-ear coordination, it did something to those brain cells so they enhanced memory."
But music is first and foremost a pleasurable rather than an intellectual experience and Saturday's seminar will also attempt to demonstrate -- via video and big-screen projections -- the variety of brain effects produced by music. "Certain types of music," Harvey says, "particularly baroque and classical, make the cognitive process more effective. But other times, rock or Hawaiian or church music serve a very important purpose."
(If you're wondering why Bach is better brain food than Britney, the answer may lie in the complex firing patterns of the neurons in our craniums. When neurobiologist Gordon Shaw first plotted these patterns as sound waves, he found that the resultant "music" bore a striking resemblance to what we call baroque.)
In his 42 years of teaching and community service, Harvey has worked with kids, adults, special needs individuals and the elderly, and he's yet to find a group immune to music. Once a week he works with preschool children with attention deficit disorder, using music to enhance perception, concentration and the release of feelings. On other days he can be found at Le'ahi Hospital playing to patients in the long-term care facility where music's restorative capabilities can come to the fore. ("What music can do is facilitate the health process or slow down the stress response, and there are enough studies to validate that music can affect your immune system.")
And on Saturdays like this coming one, he'll undoubtedly use every trick in the book to convince an audience of 500, of all ages and musical tastes, that there's a reason why we can't get those little tunes out of our heads, the ones we hear in elevators and doctors' waiting rooms, or via Discman or boombox, or pounded out on a toy piano or at the behest of a conductor's baton.
We can't get them out because they belong there.
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