Monthly Archives: November 2017
Mozart effect (part 4)
A typical case occurred with a patient of the North Italian hospital. Patient E. all her 68 years of life spoke her native North Italian Veronese dialect, very different from the standard Italian — her second language, which she studied at school, but almost never used. As a result of a stroke, the patient was speechless and for two weeks did not say a word.
Then the power of speech returned to her. There seemed to be a complete recovery. But those who came to visit her relatives were amazed that she answered them in her second, half-forgotten, standard Italian. In her native Veronese dialect, which she spoke every day of her life, she could not utter a single phrase, although she understood those who spoke to her. It was as if after the disease had “erased” the part of the brain where the native, Veronese dialect was “recorded”, some other part of the brain that had returned to memory a long-forgotten second language came into operation. Continue reading
Mozart effect (part 3)
The study of the Mozart effect on children and other experiments on the effect on the development of the child’s brain gave impetus to the widespread dissemination in American society of the ideas of the so-called child determinism — the theory that the first three years of life are decisive for the mental formation of the child. Parents were taught to care for the formation of neural networks in the child’s brain at a very early age.
This new campaign was started by Rob Rainer in a book called “I’m your child.” The first years of life remain forever, he told readers. And this is because it is in the first years of life that the child’s brain forms trillions of synapses (connections connecting brain nerve cells). Continue reading
Mozart effect (part 2)
To test their assumptions Rauscher put a special experiment on rats, which is obviously not an emotional reaction to the music. A group of 30 rats was placed in a room where Mozart’s Sonata in C major sounded for more than two months for 12 hours in a row.
It turned out that after that the rats ran the maze on average 27 percent faster and with 37 percent fewer errors than the other 80 rats that developed among random noise or in silence. According to Rausher, this experiment confirms the neurological rather than emotional nature of the Mozart effect. Continue reading
