Lerch,+Donna

Lerch, Donna. "The Mozart Effect: A Closer Look." 5 May 2000. Web. 16 Sep. 2010.
 * “As early as 1989, Congress noted the enormous rate at which scientific information on the brain was amassing. The sophistication of computer science which had become sufficient to process neuroscience data, maximizing usefulness to both researchers and clinicians, and the advances in math, physics, and brain imaging, led them to declare the last decade of the twenty-first century "The Decade of the Brain."
 * “The works of Dr. Alfred Tomatis, a French Ear, Nose, and Throat Doctor that hypothesized the lack of sound stimulation, or abnormal stimulation in utero and/or early childhood can cause aberrant behaviors and delayed or disabling communication skills”
 * “Early experimentation on the effect of music on the brain was conducted in 1988, when neurobiologist Gordon Shaw, along with graduate student Xiaodan Leng, first attempted to model brain activity on a computer at the University of California at Irvine .”
 * “They found in simulations that the way nerve cells were connected to one another predisposed groups of cells to adopt certain specific firing patterns and rhythms. Shaw surmises that these patterns form the basic exchange of mental activity.”
 * “Shaw hypothesized: If brain activity can sound like music, might it be possible to begin to understand the neural activity by working in reverse and observing how the brain responds to music? Might patterns in music somehow stimulate the brain by activating similar firing patterns of nerve clusters?”
 * “He later joined two other researchers, Frances Rauscher and Katherine Ky, in creating the study that coined the term "Mozart Effect".”
 * “In the October 14, 1993, issue of "Nature" they published a short summary of the findings from their experiment. They assigned thirty six Cal-Irvine students to one of three groups, and offered the same "pretest" to each of the students. "
 * "One group then listened to a selection by Mozart (Sonata in D major for Two Pianos, K488). A second group listened to what was called a "relaxation tape," and the third group was subjected to ten minutes of silence."
 * " All of the students were given the same test, which was designed to measure spatial IQ. This test is described as mentally unfolding a piece of paper is that has been folded over several times and then cut."
 * "The object is to correctly select the final unfolded paper shape from five examples. The students who listened to the Mozart sonata averaged an 8&endash;9 point increase in their IQ as compared to the average of the students who had listened to the relaxation tape or who had experienced silence. The increase in IQ of the Mozart group was transitory, lasting only about the time it took to take the test-- from ten to fifteen minutes.”
 * “In 1994, Stough, Kerkin, Bates, and Mangan, at the University of Aukland, failed to produce any Mozart effect.”
 * · “In 1995, researchers (Newman, Rosenbach, Burns, Latimer, Matocha, and Vogt) at State University of New York at Albany replicated the original test. They broadened the test group to 114 subjects, and the age spread from 18 to 51 years with a mean age of 27.3. Not only did they find no similar increase in spatial IQ scores after listening to Mozart, but they also polled the subjects on previous musical background, and found no correlation to higher spatial IQ scores and music lessons earlier in life, or a correlation to higher spatial IQ scores and a preference for classical music. “
 * “In 1996 and 1997, however, two studies at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, by Rideout and Taylor supported and added further evidence to suggest a "Mozart effect". One study replicated the Rauscher et al. study and, using two different spatial-reasoning tasks, measured higher spatial IQ scores after listening to a Mozart selection.”
 * “In the other study, Rideout and Laubach required 8 college students to listen to a Mozart piano sonata in one condition and no music in another condition. They measured changes in EEG ( brain wave activity) prior to listening to the Mozart and then again after listening to the Mozart while engaged in two spatial-reasoning tasks. The EEG recordings were somewhat correlated with the students' performance, as increased brain activity was associated with an increase in spatial-reasoning performance after listening to the Mozart.”
 * “In 1998, Rideout, this time with Dougherty and Wernert, found that music with characteristics similar to the works of Mozart provided the same increase in temporary spatial IQ test scores.”
 * “While no definitive results have yet been attained, scientists who are gaining knowledge of the neurological wirings and workings of the brain, as well as those trained in the science of the mind and behavior, are slowly beginning to develop theories as to why music might have an effect on intelligence.”
 * “Other researchers agree that there are neurological foundations for music's effects on cognitive ability. John Hughes, a neurologist at the University of Illinois Medical Center in Chicago, examined hundreds of compositions and concludes that music sequences that regularly repeat every 20 - 30 seconds, just as Mozart's compositions do prevalently, "may trigger the strongest response in the brain, because many functions of the central nervous system such as the onset of sleep and brain wave patterns also occur in 30-second cycles." He notes that Minimalist music by the composer Philip Glass and popular tunes score among the lowest on this measure, while music of Mozart scores two to three times higher”
 * “Musical perception is processed in the right hemisphere of the brain--the same hemisphere that performs spatial cogitation and long-term sequencing operations. "Musical perception does involve the analysis of spatial excitation patterns along the auditory receptor organ.." (Roederer)”
 * “Julene Johnson of the Institute of Brain Aging and Dementia at the University of California at Irvine found that people that suffer from Alzheimer's disease show improvement on the paper folding portion (measuring spatial IQ) of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale after 10-minute portions of Mozart, but not after silence or popular music from the 1930s. Patient's scores generally improved by a margin of 3 to 4 correct answers out of 8 test items.”
 * · “Christopher Chabris, the skeptic who steadfastly maintains that a Mozart effect does not exist observes, "this effect, if indeed there is one, is much more readily explained by established principles of neuropsychology--in this case, an effect on mood or arousal--than by some new model about columnar organization of neurons and neuron firing patterns". “