And in fact, the original researchers that did the work that led to the Mozart effect had speculated on that.
SIMON: What about the linkage that a lot of people see, at least anecdotally, between music and mathematical ability?ĭEVLIN: Yeah. But the step from what's been discovered here at Stanford last year to being able to something considerable with people with language disabilities is a huge one and it will almost certainly take many years, if indeed it it's made at all.
#Music math bets how to#
And so there certainly is the potential-this is now an established scientific result-and it does have the potential for helping us to learn how to deal with dyslexia and so forth. So the ability that musicians clearly have of being able to distinguish musical tones seems to pass over to an ability to distinguish between syllables of words. `ba' and `da,' the human ear, the human auditory system distinguishes those in a fraction of a second and it turns out that musicians can distinguish `ba' and `da' faster and better than non-musicians. But if you take the initial syllables.ĭEVLIN. SIMON: It takes-I must say, it takes someone from the British Isle to put four syllables in the word `bad.'ĭEVLIN: I obviously wouldn't have been the person to record the voices for doing it. For example, take the words `bad,' meaning not good, and `dad,' meaning father. What Gabrielli did was subject them to syllables from words. And the other subjects were people who didn't play an instrument and maybe had interest in music, but they weren't musicians. Some of the subjects were trained musicians, people who played an instrument and had done most of their lives. It was fMRI research where they sort of put people in an fMRI machine and look at their brain activity while they subject them to various stimuli. The researchers-it was a former colleague of mine called John Gabrielli(ph). I think there's a danger of the same thing happening with this Stanford research. SIMON: Because the Stanford people wouldn't make a mistake like that.ĭEVLIN: Right. SIMON: But I'll just bet this research at Stanford was different, right?
It's just that it got immediately blown up by the media and became the scientific equivalent of an urban legend. A couple of researchers purported to have established a link between listening to Mozart and the ability to perform a certain spatial reasoning task. The original research that led to the Mozart effect was genuine research. SIMON: It certainly worked with our family. What we have with the Mozart effect is a big business for selling music and books. Or at least if there is, it's so small and so inconsequential that really one shouldn't be making a fuss about it.
SIMON: Now this isn't the Mozart effect, right?ĭEVLIN: No, it isn't, and there actually isn't a Mozart effect. Our basic Math Guy here is Keith Devlin, who joins us now from the campus of Stanford to explain this research. A new study from research done at Stanford University is proving that the ability to play a musical instrument helps the brain fire at faster speeds, and that can increase the ability to read and perform basic math.