Mozart's Genius

Few classical musicians would dispute that Mozart was one of if not THE greatest musical compositional geniuses that ever lived.  First of all, his life was so disappointingly brief.  He was born in 1756 and died in 1791.  So Mozart only lived to be 35 years old. 

In his 35 brief years, he composed over 600 masterpieces, including symphonies, concertos, sonatas, operas, chamber music of all kinds, and a stunningly beautiful final "Requiem." Mozart was a brilliant musician but apprently had a very child-like personality and was never able to manage his finances or personal relationships very well.

How he wrote music that has appealed to and helped so many different kinds of people over the past 250 years, we'll never know, but if you're looking for healing music, you can't go wrong with Mozart!

Mozart Helps Preemies Gain Weight Faster!

.Playing Mozart music to premature babies seems to help them gain weight faster and become stronger, new research found.




Once a day for two consecutive days, doctors played either 30 minutes of music by the 18th-century composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, or no music, to 20 pre-term babies at the Tel Aviv Medical Center in Israel. After listening to the music, the babies were calmer and so expended less energy than the no-music group. When babies' energy expenditure is decreased, they don't need as many calories to grow, so can gain weight and thrive more quickly – exactly what preemies need.



"It's not exactly clear how the music is affecting them, but it makes them calmer and less likely to be agitated," said researcher Dror Mandel, a lecturer at Tel Aviv University.



Though the sample size was small, the scientists said their findings were statistically significant.



Previous research has shown that music can reduce stress, decrease heart rate, and increase oxygen saturation in preterm infants. Oxygen saturation is a measure of the amount of oxygen carried in the blood relative to the maximum amount the blood could carry. When this number gets low it can be a sign of heart or lung problems.



The researchers didn't try playing any music other than Mozart's, so they don't know whether the effect would hold true for other tunes.



"We want to know if what we found is a Mozart effect, or just music," Mandel told LiveScience. "I think that other composers will also have effects, however it might be that the Mozart music has particular effects compared to other composers."



The researchers decided to try Mozart music because of a 1993 study that found that college students could temporarily improve their performance on spatial–temporal tasks by listening to a Mozart sonata for 10 minutes a day.



"The repetitive melodies in Mozart's music may be affecting the organizational centers of the brain's cortex," Mandel said. "Unlike Beethoven, Bach or Bartok, Mozart's music is composed with a melody that is highly repetitive."



However, the so-called Mozart effect has sometimes been taken too far. A company called Baby Einstein (now owned by Disney) that publishes a series of Baby Mozart videos and music disks offered a refund last year for all Baby Einstein videos, after receiving complaints that the company had falsely claimed the videos were educational.



The Israeli researchers plan to test out different kinds of music soon. One team member suggested that rap music might evoke the same response as Mozart, since it has a similar pulsating and repetitive frequency.



Mandel and his colleague Ronit Lubetzky published their findings in the January issue of the journal Pediatrics.

The Mooozart Effect

After Playing Mozart at Milking Time, One Farmer Has Seen a Dramatic Shift in Cows' Temperament and Production
By REBECCA LEE

On Hans Pieter Sieber's Priegola dairy farm in Villanueva del Pardillo, Spain, the secret to success is not some newfangled technology or machine. Nor is it a time-tested technique or process handed down from generation to generation. Rather it is the dulcet, layered tones of classical music.

(ABCNEWS.com)And not just any music.

Sieber exposes his herd of approximately 700 heifers to the famous chords, crescendos and cadences of Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Once just normal, run-of-the-mill dairy cows, these Friesians now receive the rock star treatment -- listening to soothing music, sleeping on water beds, taking relaxing showers, and even enjoying sessions with an animal psychologist.

Believe it or not, since sending Mozart's Concerto for Flute and Harp in D Major soaring through their stalls at milking time, Sieber has seen a dramatic shift in the temperament and production of his Daisys and Besses.

Now his herd quietly lines up to be milked, seeming not to mind the poking and prodding that comes with being a dairy cow, and, most notably, producing anywhere from 1 to 6 more liters of milk per day than their non-Mozart listening counterparts.

"It is relaxing music for them, but at the same time it is dynamic, it keeps the cows active. The trick is not to have music too relaxing," said Sieber's son, Nicolas Sieber, the head of marketing for the Priegola farm. But Sieber believes it's simpler than that. "If you give the cows comfort they are more disposed to help out," he said.

Originally discovered by monks in Brittany, the effect of Mozart on cows' milk production is not a totally new concept.

Did Mozart believe in Lullabies?

There is a never-ending circle that connects Mozart with Dr. Alfred Tomatis with myself and Don Campbell and with new mothers and infants. The thread than runs through all of this is the time-honored lullaby. Of course mothers have lulled their babies to sleep for eons with lullabies of all kinds.

Mozart was very fond of a French folk song called "Ah, Je Vous dirai-je maman" and it's the tune we now know as "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star." Mozart wrote a famous set of variations for piano on this now internationally know tune. Dr. Tomatis was huge proponent of the health benefits of Mozart's music and an expert on the development of the ear in the unborn child. Don Campbell and I both studied with Dr. Tomatis and Don subsequently wrote "The Mozart Effect" and I subsequently produced a "Lullaby CD." You can buy the lullaby CD with Mozart's lullaby on it now!

What did Mozart really die from?

European researchers investigating records of deaths in Vienna around the time of Mozart's death at the age of 35 on 5 December 1791 suggest that the composer may have died from a streptococcal throat infection that led to a fatal kidney syndrome.

The study is the work of first author Richard HC Zegers from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and colleagues Andreas Weigl from the University of Vienna in Austria and Andrew Steptoe from University College London in the UK, and is published online in the 18 August issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The early death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has fascinated people all over the world for over 200 years, with some believing he was poisoned by a rival, while others have suggested he died from kidney failure, Henoch-Schönlein purpura (a condition where blood vessels become inflamed), trichinosis (a parasite disease caused by eating raw or undercooked pork), and many other causes.

For the study, Zegers and colleagues examined the official daily register of deaths in Vienna and compared it to what witnesses said at around the time of the composer's death.

They analyzed all deaths recorded in Vienna during the three months from November 1791 to January 1792 and then also during the same three months in 1790 to 1791 and 1792 to 1793.

According to eyewitness accounts at the time, Mozart's body was very swollen before he died, suggesting he had severe edema (swelling caused by excess fluid in bodily tissues).

After analysing the records and comparing them to the eyewitness accounts, the researchers found that:
5,011 adults (3,442 men, 1,569 women) died in total in Vienna over the 3 periods.

The mean age of death for men was 45.5 years (standard deviation SD, 18.5) and for women it was 54.5 years (SD, 19.9).

The most commonly recorded cause of death was tuberculosis (TB) and related conditions.

The second most common was cachexia (wasting syndrome) and malnutrition, and the third most common was edema.

Deaths from edema were significantly higher among younger men the weeks surrounding Mozart's death compared with the same period in preceding and following years.

This minor epidemic may have started in the city's military hospital.
Zegers and colleagues concluded that their analysis was:

"Consistent with Mozart's last illness and death being due to a streptococcal infection leading to an acute nephritic syndrome caused by poststreptococcal glomerulonephritis."

Streptococcal infection is caused by the Streptococcus bacteria of which there are many strains, including some that cause a scarlet fever rash.

In the throat the infection ranges from mild to very severe and can lead to complications such as rheumatic fever and, as the authors suggest in Mozart's case, a rare kidney condition called poststreptococcal glomerulonephritis.

Acute poststreptococcal glomerulonephritis is an inflammation of the glomeruli in the kidneys caused by an immune system reaction to streptococcal infection. The kidney's glomeruli play an essential role in filtering the blood.

Zegers and colleagues also said it was possible that scarlet fever killed Mozart, because it leads to the same kidney complication, but given the evidence from the records they examined, they thought this was less likely.

"The Death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: An Epidemiologic Perspective."
Richard H.C. Zegers, Andreas Weigl, and Andrew Steptoe.
Annals of Internal Medicine Volume 151 Issue 4, Pages 274-278, 18 August 2009.

Can Mozart Make you Smarter? Ask the expert!

Dr. Glenn Wilson, visiting professor of psychology at Gresham College, explains the effect of classical music - specifically Mozart - on the brain...

The next Mozart?

Mozart is often considered to be one of the greatest prodigies that ever lived. He was performing at age 3 and composing at age 5. But today, there is a little girl named Emily Bear, who is also a piano prodigy and composes as well. What do you think of little Emily and her playing?

Is Mozart's music the most healing music of all?

What do you really know about "The Mozart Effect?" It seems to me that many musicians are a bit "up in arms" about the whole premise. I, as a musician and a therapist, truly believe that the whole idea has been misunderstood. Neither the woman who did the original studies nor Don Campbell who came up with the idea of trademarking and writing a book called "The Mozart Effect" ever said that the music of Mozart is the most healing of all or that it raises anyone's IQ!! A very good source to look at for information is: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,901060116-1147107,00.html.
I also have a recorded program called "Healing with Music: Why Mozart?" that I think you would find very informative and factual...and entertaining! Check it out at www.HealingMusicEnterprises.com/products.html

Mozart's Birthday has come and gone!

Well phooey! Normally, I make a big deal out of Mozart's birthday because I'm a huge fan of his and some of my most sublimely ecstatic musical moments came while performing and listening to his music. The first piano concerto that was ever assigned to me by my dear teacher, Ernestine Smith, was the Concerto in c minor, slow movement. I was so proud that she thought I could do this and I practiced my little fingers to the bone! Later, I heard Mrs. Smith play Mozart's Concerto in G major with the Greenville Symphony and it was such a thrill to see that my teacher could actually practice what she preached!

The reason that Mozart's birthday slipped by me was that Louisville, KY was hit by a huge ice and snow storm and much of the city was without power for most of the week! Even though I kept my power, I had people that had to come stay with me and Mozart's birthday just slipped by.

Nevertheless, I will now offer my annual birthday special to you. Hope you can take advantage of this once a year offer. I'll leave it up for one week!

Enjoy! MOZART'S BIRTHDAY SPECIAL OFFER

Mozart for Christmas

Hmmmm...do you think Mozart would approve? Actually, I think he would be quite amused! Mozart had a wonderful sense of humor and was very playful, as is this wonderful video!

Interesting Mozart Research

Mozart versus new age music: relaxation states, stress, and ABC relaxation theory.Smith JC, Joyce CA.Roosevelt University Stress Institute, Roosevelt University, Chicago, IL 60605, USA. jsmith@roosevelt.eduSmith's (2001) Attentional Behavioral Cognitive (ABC) relaxation theory proposes that all approaches to relaxation (including music) have the potential for evoking one or more of 15 factor-analytically derived relaxation states, or "R-States" (Sleepiness, Disengagement, Rested / Refreshed, Energized, Physical Relaxation, At Ease/Peace, Joy, Mental Quiet, Childlike Innocence, Thankfulness and Love, Mystery, Awe and Wonder, Prayerfulness, Timeless/Boundless/Infinite, and Aware). The present study investigated R-States and stress symptom-patterns associated with listening to Mozart versus New Age music. Students (N = 63) were divided into three relaxation groups based on previously determined preferences. Fourteen listened to a 28-minute tape recording of Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and 14 listened to a 28-minute tape of Steven Halpern's New Age Serenity Suite. Others (n = 35) did not want music and instead chose a set of popular recreational magazines. Participants engaged in their relaxation activity at home for three consecutive days for 28 minutes a session. Before and after each session, each person completed the Smith Relaxation States Inventory (Smith, 2001), a comprehensive questionnaire tapping 15 R-States as well as the stress states of somatic stress, worry, and negative emotion. Results revealed no differences at Session 1. At Session 2, those who listened to Mozart reported higher levels of At Ease/Peace and lower levels of Negative Emotion. Pronounced differences emerged at Session 3. Mozart listeners uniquely reported substantially higher levels of Mental Quiet, Awe and Wonder, and Mystery. Mozart listeners reported higher levels, and New Age listeners slightly elevated levels, of At Ease/Peace and Rested/Refreshed. Both Mozart and New Age listeners reported higher levels of Thankfulness and Love. In summary, those who listened to Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik reported more psychological relaxation and less stress than either those who listened to New Age music or read popular recreational magazines. Results suggest the usefulness of ABC relaxation theory in comparing the different effects of music and relaxation techniques.

Mozart Effect Hits a Sour Note

It sounds too easy to be true. Play Mozart for your child and her or his IQ will jump 8 to 9 points, even while she or he is still in the womb.
These days parents will try anything to help Ashley or Chad get into the best schools, and politicians, teachers, and music marketers have all jumped on the bandwagon.
The state of Georgia now gives a cassette or CD of classical music to the parents of every newborn citizen, more than 100,000 babies a year. A bill recently passed in Florida mandates that all childcare and educational programs that receive state funding play 30 minutes of classical music a day for children under 5 years of age. Hudson Valley Community College in New York has a Mozart Effect Study Area in its campus library, and many music stores boast a "Mozart makes you smarter" section.
It all started in 1993, when a small research study concluded that listening to only 10 minutes of a Mozart piano sonata temporarily raised the "abstract reasoning" ability of 36 college students the equivalent of 8 to 9 points on a standard IQ scale. That provided enough "scientific evidence" for music marketers to sing about.
Other scientists did the same experiment, but most of them didn’t get the same results. Yet the idea that Mozart’s music could boost IQ continued to generate runaway popular support, and the research that produced contrary conclusions received little attention.
Last year, Christopher Chabris, then a graduate student at Harvard University, wondered about the net result of studies on the Mozart effect that had been done over the previous five years. He uncovered 16 studies and analyzed their conclusions.
"The results do not show any real change in IQ or reasoning ability," says Chabris, now a research fellow at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. "There’s a very small enhancement in learning a specific task, such as visualizing the result of folding and cutting paper, bu t even that is not statistically significant. The improvement is smaller than the average variation of a single person’s IQ test performance."
His conclusion: "There’s nothing wrong with having young people listen to classical music, but it’s not going to make them smarter."

Who Claims What

Chabris’ results appeared in the August 26 issue of Nature, the same journal that first published claims of the positive effect of listening to Mozart. Another paper published by researchers at Appalachian State University in North Carolina and at two Canadian universities echoes the Harvard conclusion.
Kenneth Steele and his collaborators repeated the original experiment and decided that, "there is little evidence for a direct effect of music on reasoning ability."
Steele’s group included the paper-folding and -cutting test in its experiments. The test requires the reader to visualize a series of folds and cuts that have been made on a sheet of paper, then to select from multiple-choice offerings an image of what the unfolded sheet looks like. The group found no effect on the performance of test-takers after listening to Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, the music played in the original experiment.
Steele and his collaborators compared test performances after hearing this sonata, sitting in silence, or listening to either relaxation instructions, relaxation music, or minimalist music. "The Mozart sonata produced no differential improvement in spatial reasoning in any experiment," Steele notes.
"A requiem may therefore be in order," he continues, referring to the title of the last piece that Mozart wrote.
However, the lead researcher on the original experiment is not ready for a funeral. Frances Rauscher, now at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, notes in Nature that she and her colleagues never said that listening to Mozart enhances intelligence.
"We made no such claim," she insists. "The effect is limited to spatial-temporal tasks involving mental imagery and temporal ordering."
Chabris, however, insists that Rauscher did make such a claim. Rauscher’s original 1993 paper reports that, "We performed an experiment in which students were given three sets of standard IQ spatial reasoning tasks." These consisted of paper folding and cutting, plus two other "abstract/spatial reasoning tasks. Each task was preceded by ten minutes of [either] (1) listening to Mozart’s sonata for two pianos in D major, (2) listening to a relaxation tape, or (3) silence. . . . The IQs of subjects participating in the music condition were 8-9 points above their IQ scores in the two other conditions."
This last sentence, Chabris says, "explains why readers of the original article and secondary reports of it believe that the Mozart effect applied to a variety of tasks and reasoning abilities – in other words, to general intelligence."
In the rebuttal published along with Chabris’ and Steele’s critiques, Rauscher claims that four new studies all demonstrate a Mozart effect on not one but three different spatial tasks. The results of these studies, however, are yet to be released. She also noted that rats exposed to the Mozart sonata while in the uterus and for 60 days after birth learned to run mazes faster and with fewer errors than litter mates who had not heard the music.
Chabris calls the study with rats not relevant to the facts. "Even if one limits the Mozart effect to spatial-temporal processing, as Rauscher now insists," he says, "it is still about 75 percent smaller than originally claimed, and not statistically significant."
These disagreements aside, all those involved in the studies now agree on one major fact: listening to Mozart does not enhance general intelligence.
The state of Georgia might spend the $ 105,000 it allocated for classical music tapes and CDs on more important things, Chabris believes. "And parents can help their young children more by reading with them and playing with them than by leaving them alone with classical music CDs," he says. "You can enjoy classical music with your children without believing that it will grow brain cells or boost IQ."
As you might expect, Rauscher still maintains that children will learn spatial tasks better with than without Mozart, so the last note about the controversy has yet to be sounded.
This article first appeared in the Harvard Gazette, 1999

If Mozart Had had Better Healthcare...

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI NYTimes

POOR Mozart, who died at 35, must have inherited at least the potential for longevity from his parental gene pool.His father, Leopold Mozart, died at 67, a ripe old age in an era when rampant illnesses claimed the majority of European children in infancy. Sadly, Mozart’s indomitable mother, Anna Maria, died at 58 while in Paris, having contracted viral infections and a severe fever during an arduous trip with her rambunctious, opportunity-seeking 22-year-old son. Mozart’s sister, Nannerl, who had also been a musical prodigy, died in 1829 in Salzburg at the impressive age of 78, having well outlived her husband, an officious Austrian prefect and two-time widower with five children, who resented their stepmother.
Mozart’s death in 1791 was probably caused by streptococcal infection, renal failure, terminal bronchial pneumonia and a matrix of other illnesses, some dating from his childhood, when the Mozart family spent years touring Europe to show off the boy genius and, to a lesser extent, his sister.

Music and Stress Management...Try Mozart!

The latest research, by the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and the University of Sussex, had provided new evidence about how music boosts the immune system.

The researchers carried out two studies looking at the effects of music on stress hormones. After exposing around 300 people to happy dance music, the researchers measured levels of immunoglobulin A or IgA and hormones including cortisol and adrenocorticotropic hormone.

Results show that cortisol levels dropped significantly, while IgA levels went up considerably in those exposed to music for around 50 minutes. Effects on compounds involved in inflammation and behaviour were also seen, and mood improved noticeably in those exposed to music.

These findings provide clues to the understanding the role of music in health. Cortisol is a hormone produced in response to stress and it increases blood pressure and blood sugar levels, and weakens the immune system. The drop in levels of the hormone in response to music may explain the reduction in blood pressure and risk of infections found by other researchers.

The rise in IgA is also an important finding because it is an antibody that plays an essential role in protecting the body against infections and allergens.

In some cases, music has been effective as drug therapy. At the Hospital Mutua de Terrassa, in Barcelona, doctors compared the effectiveness of music to that of diazepam or Valium in reducing anxiety before surgery in 207 patients. One group had the drug, while the other listened to music on the day and eve of surgery. Just before the operation, heart rate and blood pressure were tested, and there was no difference between the two groups.

How was Mozart's Health?

Recently one of my clients/patients asked me about Mozart's health. What an interesting question! After all that's been in the news about how Mozart's music can do all kinds of wonderful things, we come back to Mozart's own physical and mental health. Some of the things he is purported to have suffered from include:

depression
mania
addictions (both sex and spending)
narsicism (understandable!)
poor overall physical health (Thus his death at age 36!)
insomnia

One might ask, why didn't the music he was writing help him? Of course that's not an easy question...already, volumes have been written about it. One of his over-riding problems was poverty! He lived in cold, drafty quarters and often spent th money he earned with commissions on more velvet clothes, powdered wigs and fun out on the town! At least that's what "Amadeus" seems to be protraying.

Mozart was one of the greatest musical geniuses that ever lived. Today, no one would deny that. It's too bad he couldn't have benefited from the "Mozart Effect" himself!

Dr. Mozart: Mozart Comes to the Surgery Suite

The operating room of a hospital is a highly stressful place. Surgeons and assistants have to be extremely attentive, moving quickly but carefully. Playing music during surgeries has been shown to relax the staff and the patients. Some of the benefits that extend to the recovery room are lower heart rate, blood pressure and reduced need for pain medication.
Dr. Claudius Conrad, now a senior surgical resident at Harvard Medical School, suggests music can go even further. He’s published a paper suggesting that music can stimulate a 50 percent jump in pituitary growth hormone. The hormone is associated with stress but, paradoxically, can help exert healing. Dr. Conrad is also a classically-trained pianist with a doctorate in music theory.
Also, the study of music therapy has evolved in the United States for the past half a century, and there’s growing evidence that music is as good for the body as it is for the soul.

Mozart's Power Music!

Katia Eliad, a Paris-based artist, was stuck in a rut. She felt blocked in her creativity, out of touch with herself and for some inexplicable reason unable to use green or blue in her abstract paintings. So last spring, she started an unusual treatment: daily two-hour sessions of Mozart's music for three weeks at a time, filtered through special vibrating headphones that sometimes cut out the lowest tones. The impact, she says, was dramatic. "I'm much more at ease with myself, with people, with everything," says Eliad, 33. "It feels like I've done 10 years of psychoanalysis in just eight months." Blue and green are back in her palette. As for Mozart, "he's become like a grandfather who calms you when you wake up in the middle of a nightmare."

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born 250 years ago, on Jan. 27, 1756, and lavish celebrations are being planned around the world to celebrate his anniversary. This year will be filled with his music, but it will also be a time to re-examine the contradictions and conflicting interpretations of his brief 35-year life. He has been cast in many roles: the infant prodigy paraded around European courts by his father, Leopold; the foulmouthed brat whose letters attest to a fondness for off-color practical jokes. One widespread misconception has him buried in a pauper's grave in Vienna's St. Marx Cemetery. Another unproven legend, given widespread credence thanks to the hit movie Amadeus, depicts him as the victim of his jealous court rival Antonio Salieri. Fervent admirers have argued that he was divinely inspired, but some modern psychologists detect an infantile-regressive personality. And if he were alive today, says Herbert Brugger of the Salzburg tourism office, he would be "a pop star — somewhere between Prince, Michael Jackson and Robbie Williams."

There's little new about such typecasting. But over the past decade, Mozart has increasingly been placed in a role that is perhaps the most controversial of all: as healer of mind and body. In this New Age interpretation, Mozart is the ultimate composer-therapist whose music can help treat ailments ranging from acne to Alzheimer's disease and even, it is claimed, make you and your kids smarter. Some of these claims are based on science. One neurosurgeon in Chicago has conducted studies that show certain Mozart pieces can reduce the severity and frequency of epileptic seizures in some patients, while researchers in Irvine, California, have found that some people with Alzheimer's are better able to perform mental tests after listening to Mozart for 10 minutes.

But much of the supporting material is anecdotal. French actor Gérard Depardieu says Mozart helped to cure his childhood stutter. Eliad, the painter, received her treatment at an institute founded by a Paris physician named Alfred Tomatis, who pioneered the use of Mozart's music to treat all sorts of childhood disorders as well as adult ailments including depression. Few national authorities officially recognize the treatment, and traditional music therapists are deeply skeptical. Still, Poland is currently introducing Tomatis' methods nationwide in centers that help children with learning difficulties. And in the London suburb of Richmond, Jackie Hindley credits it with helping her 6-year-old son Lawrence. He was a slow developer and hyperactive, Hindley says, with a particular language difficulty: whenever people spoke to him, he would stay quiet for half an hour before coming back with an answer, she says. After several sessions of listening to Mozart, "he's now a very active speaker who responds immediately to whatever is said to him," Hindley says. "He's taken very profound steps forward."

By far the most widespread — and most disputed — recent claim is that Mozart can enhance your brain power. That notion was first given scientific support in a 1993 article in Nature, which found that college students who listened to the first movement of Mozart's Sonata in D Major for Two Pianos performed better on a spatial reasoning test that involved mentally unfolding a piece of paper. The study's main author, Frances Rauscher, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin who is also a cellist, went on to do a similar test using laboratory rats. They were exposed to the same piano sonata in utero and for two months after birth, and then let loose in a maze. There they navigated their way out far quicker than three other groups of rats, which had been exposed to white noise, silence or a highly repetitive piece by American composer Philip Glass.

In the decade since, these studies have sparked an academic storm, with many of Rauscher's peers either refining or debunking her findings. Other researchers have had mixed success in replicating her results. But her work received widespread media attention and gave rise to a pop-psychology trend known as the "Mozart effect." Dozens of Mozart compilation CDs that promise to enhance intelligence are now on the market, with titles such as Mozart for Mommies and Daddies — Jumpstart Your Newborn's IQ. The claims have had social-policy repercussions: in 1998, the U.S. state of Georgia began handing out classical-music CDs to the parents of all infants, and there are similar but less official programs in Colorado, Florida and elsewhere.

Benefits of Mozart in Surgery...scientific and empirical!

For Claudius Conrad, a 30-year-old surgeon who has played the piano seriously since he was 5, music and medicine are entwined — from the academic realm down to the level of the fine-fingered dexterity required at the piano bench and the operating table.
“If I don’t play for a couple of days,” said Dr. Conrad, a third-year surgical resident at Harvard Medical School who also holds doctorates in stem cell biology and music philosophy, “I cannot feel things as well in surgery. My hands are not as tender with the tissue. They are not as sensitive to the feedback that the tissue gives you.”
Like many surgeons, Dr. Conrad says he works better when he listens to music. And he cites studies, including some of his own, showing that music is helpful to patients as well — bringing relaxation and reducing blood pressure, heart rate, stress hormones, pain and the need for pain medication.

In a paper published last December in the journal Critical Care Medicine, he and colleagues revealed an unexpected element in distressed patients’ physiological response to music: a jump in pituitary growth hormone, which is known to be crucial in healing. “It’s a sort of quickening,” he said, “that produces a calming effect.” Accelerando produces tranquillo.
The study itself was fairly simple. The researchers fitted 10 postsurgical intensive-care patients with headphones, and in the hour just after the patients’ sedation was lifted, 5 were treated to gentle Mozart piano music while 5 heard nothing.
The patients listening to music showed several responses that Dr. Conrad expected, based on other studies: reduced blood pressure and heart rate, less need for pain medication and a 20 percent drop in two important stress hormones, epinephrine and interleukin-6, or IL-6. Amid these expected responses was the study’s new finding: a 50 percent jump in pituitary growth hormone.
No one conducting these studies had yet measured growth hormone, whose work includes driving growth, responding to threats to the immune system and promoting healing. Dr. Conrad included it because research over the last five years has shown that growth hormone generally rises with stress and falls with relaxation.
“This means you would expect G.H., like epinephrine and IL-6, to go down in this case,” Dr. Morley, of St. Louis University, said of growth hormone. “Yet here it goes up.”
He added, “The question is whether the jump in growth hormone actually drives the sedative effect or is part of something else going on.”
Dr. Conrad argues that the growth hormone does have a sedative effect. In his paper he cites a 2005 study showing that growth hormone releasing factor, a chemical messenger that essentially calls growth hormone to duty, reduced activity of interleukin-6. This suggests, he said, that growth hormone itself may reduce the interleukin-6 and epinephrine levels that produce inflammation that in turn causes pain and raises blood pressure and the heart rate.
This explanation gets a mixed reception among stress researchers. “The two dynamics aren’t necessarily the same,” said Dr. Keith W. Kelley, an endocrinologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an expert on inflammatory responses. “I personally don’t buy the particular cellular mechanism he’s proposing.”
Yet Dr. Kelley and other stress-response experts, including Dr. Morley and Dr. Bruce S. McEwen of Rockefeller University in New York, say Dr. Conrad’s study clearly suggests that a rise in growth hormone may somehow dampen inflammation and stress responses.
“This is a really intriguing possibility that bears a closer look,” Dr. McEwen said.

Music and Genetics: What creates a Mozart?

Music under the microscope: the relation between biology and genetics and human music, its peculiarities and reasons. These are the main themes of the International Workshop on the Biology and Genetics of Music, to be held in Bologna, May 20 to 22, with leading scientists currently involved in researching the mysteries of music, invited to explain their recent findings to the audience. The meeting is organized by the European Genetics Foundation and the Fondazione Pierfranco e Luisa Mariani, in collaboration with the Orchestra Mozart, the Municipality of Bologna and the University of Bologna. It is part of the agenda of the second edition of the Festival of Music and Genetics, taking place from May 12 to 22, 2007 (http://www.musicagenetica.it/).
The topics of the meeting are various: from the research of genes responsible for our becoming great pianists (or, on the contrary, being completely tone-deaf), to the evolution of music in the history of mankind through the comparison with other animal species; from the role played by music in children's education, to the study of children to understand the musical mind. Why do infant prodigies exist? Why haven’t we all become one? Are there any types of music that are objectively better suited to be more appreciated than others? And especially what is the purpose of music? These and other questions will be addressed by geneticists, psychologists, biologists, but also anthropologists and musicologists during the open conferences hosted in the Palazzo del Podestà. “All this is not just caused by curiosity: studying the way music is read, interpreted and appreciated by our brain enables us to understand many things about the workings of the mind – adds Maria Majno, Executive Director of the Fondazione Pierfranco e Luisa Mariani. For example, it opens the way to research certain pathologic conditions or track and even modify children’s cognitive development. Also, it leads to imagining possible applications for patients with different medical problems as well as potential treatments based on listening and producing music”.

Do cats like Mozart? Meet "Meeow-zart!"

I have gotten so many responses to the first Nora video that I knew you'd want to see the sequel. One friend suggested today that the kitty might be a little deaf and really enjoys the vibrations that she creates with her paws. What do you think?