PRI Public Radio International That's what they say. Is. He? It is easy to enjoy music whether you perform it or listen to it or even Delight in it by whistling. I'm Mandy Patinkin. Would not be so simple to imagine the void in our lives if music somehow vanished The Emptiness I think would be intolerable the silence suffocating as the philosopher Friedrich. Nietzsche recorded music is something for the sake of which it is worthwhile to live on Earth. Open the next hour. You'll be hearing some stories about the connection between science and music and the mind it is a relatively new area of research and it has scientists looking inside the brain to see how a symphony or song Can shape us and move us and even help Define us as human beings. You'll hear how this musical rendition of what the brain sounds like inspired a scientist to ask whether studying music can make you smarter. We'll talk about how music can trigger feelings from Joy to sadness to Shivers and you'll meet one man who's emotional response to music increase dramatically following a brain aneurysm. The DeWitt they sing is of such intensity that I can't even listen to it. I'm just comforted by it. I mean it's painful. I can make one woman who suffers from a form of mental retardation a condition called Williams syndrome, but just listen to her sing and the Very nature of intelligence is brought into question. I'm Mandy Patinkin and you're listening to a special edition of Grey matters music and the Brain. all pool when the Irish writer Oscar Wilde sat down at the piano was Chopin something happened to his mind after playing Chopin wild said I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed and mourning over tragedies that were not my own music always seems to me to produce that effect. Oscar Wilde understood something that all of us who perform or listen to music understand that music can touch us that music Rouses up feelings one of the most difficult yet fascinating and least understood areas of music and brain research centers on the emotions Robert ran prepared this report. I was mean to you. A rock group called meatloaf would seem to be an unlikely research tool for a neuroscientist buttock pain except professor of cycle biology at Bowling Green State University in Ohio is a neuroscientist. And he's one of a handful of researchers trying to figure out how music interacts with the brain to modify moods and emotions past up says nobody yet has identify the specific brain mechanisms that translate music into emotions, but he says that Meatloaf or at least one of their songs has told him something quite interesting when you come to 5th minute and he starts ripping and he starts wailing about your lost love and at that point you'll have piles. You probably know what panksepp is talking about because at some point in your life while listening to music, you've probably experienced musical chills panksepp says there a shivaree gooseflesh type of sensation one, very common area people have experiences the back of the neck spreading out across the arms while some people have it on just certain parts of the body other people all over the body except has studied how this song and others have generated chills and hundreds of listeners. He says no single piece of music is guaranteed to produce chills because the listeners personal experience is an important variable people tend to have chills to the music they know and love but with the right mix of ingredients a given piece of music is more likely than not to send shivers down the spine one essential component is establishing a background mood. What if you don't have a background mood and a pro? We have to be a sad Bittersweet loss of Love type of mood. The chill is unlikely to elaborate. Panksepp says this composition by the Estonian composer arvo. Parrot illustrates the point the peace begins slowly sparsely and such a sad Melancholy stage exit is found it among listeners. He has tested the chills occur when the music suddenly shifts and a single voice like a lonely anguished cry in the wilderness emerges from the background. Except says no one has decipher the neurological cause of chills, but he speculates that it may have something to do with the neurochemicals the brain releases when confronting the most basic human experience. The most primitive sound is the sound of a child that is lost or in distress a child that cries and this has to have a powerful powerful emotional response on the nervous system of the caretaker and we think that this primitive process is the one that might be captivated by those so moving passengers music the produce chills. Chills are normal emotional response when human beings listen to music, but what happens when something goes wrong with the brain, how do brain injuries affect our ability to feel the music. We're listening to neuroscientist are beginning to find out by studying patients who have suffered some form of brain trauma like an accident or stroke. Hello from the other Broadway shows like Bye Bye Birdie and Golden Boy trained as a cellist home and also played for the New York Philharmonic nowadays 75 he teaches music at a small community college in New York Mark tramo is a neurologist at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. When dr. Trammell met Shepherd calm in about 10 years ago. The setting was a hospital not a Broadway stage. Major Concert Hall. Mr. Coleman suffered a rupture of an artery that lies on the surface of the front of the brain. And when this artery burst through Awakening in a small so-called aneurysm a large amount of blood Spilled Out and resulted almost immediately and, he bad day had to undergo life-saving brain surgery Shepherd calm and survive the surgery. Although part of his brain was damaged by all the bleeding within a few weeks. He was alert he could talk and he could walk and eventually after he left the hospital he could return to his profession. But Coleman says that after his brain surgery, there was a dramatic difference in the way. He reacted while listening to music. I hear more my awareness is heightened. The intensity of my reaction is high. It's like a microscope you fine-tune that knob and suddenly things are in relief. They stand out and you recognize the men you hear them and you can identify them when he would play a piece of music that previously he would find emotional after the brain damage. He was unable to control those emotions and would break out into tears. For example of the moving part of the peace Shepherd calm and says that it's classical music that pushes his emotions Every Witch Way smaller does it to him? So do Tchaikovsky and Vagner and then there's my grandma Butterfly by Puccini Coleman says there's one part of the Opera where Madame Butterfly sings a duet with her handmaiden Suzuki that simply too much to bear. The duet they sing is of such intensity that I can't even listen to it. I'm discomforted by it. I mean it's painful. Have you ever looked at something that you thought was so overwhelmingly beautiful? Thank you. Turn away from it. I know you have well, that's what happens. Shepherd Coleman says that he cries more now when he listens to music and he tends to listen to music now in private with the volume way up or he feels free to be carried away and despite the ordeal of his brain surgery. Coleman is pleased with a man he has become for he is a musician and he relates now to music and a new and vibrant manner. I wouldn't have it any other way. That's I wish I could do it again. And again by the same increment. Do I rather go back to how it was before the answer is a qualified new aneurysms or Strokes off and lose some cognitive or emotional function. But with Shepherd Coleman brain damage appears to have enhanced a normally experience. The motion Trey, Moe says that's counterintuitive to traditional models of how the brain works in addition famous says Coleman's experience shows that the perception of music and the emotional response are controlled by different brain systems. So that on the one hand it's one thing to feel an emotion. But on the other hand, it's another to control it in an appropriate context that's associated with the sensory experience. And in this case music neuroscientist know generally that the emotional function of the brain is associated with something called the limbic system a collection of structures that lie deep beneath the cortex. The brain's outer surface experiments on animals have shown that if parts of the limbic system are stimulated and animal can be moved to Ray Georgia Terror, but emotions are extraordinarily complex and other areas of the brain are implicated as well. Yak panksepp the cycle biologist who studies chills says the frontal lobes a section of the cortex that sits behind the forehead are also important in generating emotions. We could afford arousal out the frontal lobes and really the frontal lobes are what make us human. And that is the part of the brain that allows us to have foresight to have concern for other people empathy researchers do not know yet whether the brain contains specific circuits or specific chemistry is that when touched by The Sound of Music come alive in a way to make us feel emotional but scientists are using a variety of Imaging techniques like MRIs and EEG to look inside the brain to see how it listens to music the picture that seems to be emerging is that different parts of the brain respond to different aspects of music so Timber Harmony, there are Imaging studies that each of those three variables is Mediated by different parts of the brain thinks it says studies of brain wave activity show that when people listen to music The Wave patterns become much more synchronize with each other and he wondered how emotions might fit in ear how different kinds of music music generally considered to be happy or sad might affect. These wave patterns panksepp says he found happy music tends to produce some more relaxed brain where I said music tends to produce a more aroused brain. It makes a lot of evolutionary sense that when we're sad, we have many more things to think about and saw so the aroused pattern that we see is harmonious with that perspective. That's a little happy to Eileen Ivers is one of the country's best Irish fiddle players. She's currently the lead violinist with Riverdance the phenomenally successful production of Irish step dancing Alina. Wonder if you could play a tune into very different ways that elicits very different feelings. Playing a tune should have two different ways recently Ivar's visited the recording studio at Carnegie Hall to sit down with another violin player. Jamshed bharucha. Perugia is not a professional musician. Although he does playing a chamber group. He works instead as a cognitive psychologist at Dartmouth where he's editor of a scholarly Journal called music perception. Roucha met with Eileen Ivers to talk about and to illustrate what a musician does to evoke emotions in a listener. It is a complicated process bruchis is in which much depends not only on the musician skills, but on the cultural environment and personal experience of a listener, but there are probably some Universal characteristics of music that evokes feelings bharucha says, they involve movement Tempo Rhythm and timing and controls emotions like Serenity or aggressiveness. They stem in all likelihood from Human physiology and from Human speech. I wear when you're agitated. Your movements are more rapid your heart is pumping more your voice tends to have a greater pitch range dynamic range and the onset of your voice whenever you're a trendy articulating is more rapid and so music can pick up on these very physiological cues to provide some Cues that are likely to be Universal in conveying emotion bharucha says the most important component of experiencing emotions in music involves a violation of expectations listeners, like music that's expected in familiar, but listeners also, enjoy surprises music that's novel music that violates expectations. I wonder if Eileen you play a tune and then start violating Expectations by playing some wrong notes. Sure. We will just take a basic real or two night. I love to play for years cold star of Munster apologies to have everybody out there. I can get a little funny but one of the points that I didn't had so carefully demonstrated here is that even people who don't have any formal musical training can immediately recognize and some of the familiar patterns have been violated of course too much familiarity can be boring and music that's too unpredictable can sound disconcerting bharucha says people tend to like a little bit of both and people tend to like the musical sounds of the culture in which they were raised. So the sounds of a musical scale in Dublin may sound distasteful in dissonance to a listener and Zimbabwe or Brazil bharucha says a person in 1 musical environment is actually likely to have a different set of brain connections a different neural internalization of culture. Then somebody in another environment. The brain is the repository of our culture. It's in the brain that are cultural experience and cultural conventions are encoded to that. When we listen to music, we listen to music through cultural lenses if you like and the cultural lenses way the brain is wired as a result of experience in that culture. Whatever your culture is playing at the music you listen to Will resonate inside your head and Trigger sensations of joy and sadness Serenity or chills. It's a defining Human Experience and experience that science is only beginning to understand. Eventually researchers hope to find out exactly how the brain rest emotions from a tune or a symphony or song Mean Time. They and everyone else can feel content. But the search will be mostly pleasurable carried out in the vast wonders laboratory called music. This is Robert ran recording. After World War 1 veterans hospitals noticed that music could sue their shell shocked patients a new health profession was born music therapy today music therapists work with a variety of patients including autistic children and people with Parkinson's disease music is also used with Alzheimer's patients and others suffering from brain damage or deterioration. Well therapist report some astonishing results scientists caution that no one knows for sure what music is doing for these patients and Cooper has this report in the 1990 film Awakenings. Robin Williams plays a doctor determine to bring his nursing home patients out of their catatonic State he probes for any signs of awareness. Can they catch a ball tossed to them? Can they concentrate on TV? Can they respond to music? This is one of the most beautiful Arias ever watch them closely for any reactions. In the movie The Doctor finds a drug and some therapies that help music is one of them, but the right record on the phonograph that seems and mental fog lift briefly but long enough to eat a meal or play a hand of cards these movie Awakenings were based on a book written by Oliver Sacks and neurologist whose real life patients lived in a New York Hospital called Beth Abraham. It's located in a Shabby neighborhood of the Bronx and even before Oliver Sacks arrived there in the 1960s Beth. Abraham was pioneering music therapy sing together now, okay. I'm going to a ragged but enthusiastic chorus of Beth Abraham patients follows. The queues of John Marino, one of the hospitals music therapist, most of the dozen or so patients here are elderly women, but there are others as well including a tall young man in his early twenties. All of these patients share a common Affliction dementia Strokes or accidents have damaged their brain robbing them of memories and sometimes basic skills like the ability to talk or walk or feed themselves, but during this sing along everyone seems alert and focused on the music so not always in perfect pitch. And one last time for the first thing I see is an emotional response. I see a smile or a Grimace Sora a change in the eyes. Connie tomato is the director of Beth Abraham's music therapy department as much as anyone tomato is responsible for Beth Abraham's believe that music far from being just cheerful entertainment for patients can trigger memories trapped in unreachable part of a dementia patients brain and hearing the melody again will bring back. So if this part of your life, And if the Melodies played enough, then there's a way of helping them retrieve what we acknowledge some of those memories so they feel connected to what's going on around them. And that's so if that's probably what happens with people with Alzheimer's disease where they respond to music twice a week tomato works with another more difficult group for elderly long-term patients who have advanced dementia. They are anti-social spending listless days in their hospital room and shunning all activities, except the music sessions over here. If you'd like to play it again, I have to drum if you'd like to play it these patients are part of a study tomato is working on testing whether music can coax them back into contact with the world and especially with other people. It's good to see you Robinson. It's good to see you on a Tuesday afternoon. Tomaino serenades, each of the patients there seated in wheelchairs motionless and barely responding as the music therapist bends down to greet them. But over the next hour as tomato pumps out old standards and special request from her accordion for tiny audience slowly begins to animate. She plays Bolero in the dark eyes of Aurora and immigrant from Ecuador suddenly shine with bright recognition Sadie. The Russian woman has no request she dozes much of the time. But even with her eyes are shut she keeps beating time on her drum. Robert has any special music that you like to hear today? Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait wait. This number brings Robert briefly to life. He waves his hands in time to the music but smiles and drum beating and lips forming silent words are the most tomato can come from these four patients this group only began meeting a few weeks ago. She says that's probably not long enough to expect the kind of dramatic responses that Connie tomato and other music therapist have sometimes recorded So you'll see a Parkinson's person who who really can't get after wheelchair. Folsom bound out of the chair and walk across the room if the right music's playing tomato says even small changes can be major victories for elderly patients with I have seen his people who couldn't feed themselves. No recognize that there's a plate of food in front of them and have the attention span to actually look at the food long enough to realize it's there in make sense of what it is. I've all to heck a man who couldn't remember his wife's name. She said if there's anything I want is for him to call me by my name and that happened to Maino can't say precisely how music affected the brains of these patients. That's one reason why many health insurance don't cover the cost of music therapy. We all know the music makes you feel better and makes you can relax you we can make it a pleasant experience and emotional triggers a memory and it may be that that's all that it does. Joseph. Arezzo is vice chairman of the Department of neuroscience at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. It's not far from Beth Abraham in the Bronx. Arezzo says medical schools have been slow to consider therapies from outside the mainstream like music while more than 70 colleges and universities offer degrees in music therapy and some 5,000 therapist have been certified in the United States. Arrezzo says music is still considered an alternative. That means any benefits that may bring must be scientifically proven before it can earn the full respect of the medical establishment still arezzo says the anecdotes and enthusiasm a music therapist are intriguing and science May someday show that music helps restructure or even reorganize the brain to recover lost skills for instance is extremely strong data now suggesting that music the repetitive beat of Music can help synchronize walking can synchronize movement. So in some Parkinson's patients and patients recovering from stroke the beat of a background musical piece clearly helps them walk better less clear says arezzo is music significance in treating patients with memory loss or language dysfunction. That doesn't mean a linkage won't be found says arezzo, but it will take scientific research not just Anecdotes to prove it. I'm an Cooper reporting. To say do you want to hear the fifth song? Okay. I'm Mandy Patinkin and you're listening to a special one-hour edition of Grey matters music and the Brain from PRI Public Radio International. When Mozart was 14, he wrote out the entire score to an imposing Coral work allegri's miserere after hearing only a single performance aside from being an impressive feat of memory for centuries. This event has prompted people to wonder whether the brains of musicians are physically different from those of non-musicians today researchers are beginning to gather a few Clues to help answer that question the results suggest that to some extent the brains of musicians do look different. This is particularly true when it comes to Absolute pitch the ability to identify a note without reference to any other note. John Greenberg has a report I grew up listening to my uncle Louis shub play the piano for years. He has referred to himself as your favorite uncle with absolute pitch. He is safe on both points. He is my only uncle and whatever the source of a sound if a tone is pure enough Luke and name it have filled wine glasses tap with a spoon car horns and doorbells. That's G. Let's go to the piano and check it out. You'll have to take my word for it. The piano key was ge-lu is 85 years old and he began his training as a concert pianist when he was 11. I started music for about a half year before I was able to do not realize that each tone had a different sound a different color. If you will the ability of some people to have such a peculiar sensation of notes is what first intrigued Gottfried schlaug a neurologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston flog has spent most of this decade mapping the brains of musicians and non-musicians. His research has zeroed in on a particular structure in the brain as the location of absolute pitch using magnetic resonance, imaging or MRI schlaug watch the brains of musicians and non-musician says, they listen to a series of tones like this. task force to compare each NuTone futones go and then make a decision if this new tone was same or different. Flag also played another tape for his subjects not of tones, but of the simplest forms of speech listen to Pho names for names for example of Baja, which of the elemental parts of our language subjects didn't need to do anything when they heard those sounds they just had to listen but their brains responded and smoke was watching for which little fold of gray matter was activated the structure that lit up Sir speak was the planum temporale elect a squiggly pancake of tissue that starts in the center of the brain and fans out slow. Saw that the planum temporale I was significantly larger in musicians with absolute pitch and when he compared how his subjects use this part of their brain when they heard the simple phoning he found something else. That's what Christmas stations show a very prominent activation in the left final temporada when they To the stonetoss Casuelas to phoning task file not absolute pitch subjects only show prominent activation in the left planum temporale when they process phonemes, but not when they're processed owns. Everyone uses the planum temporale a to decipher language study strongly suggest that people with absolute pitch use the same equipment, even if it's a bit larger to decipher musical notes, so I'll also believes all the way. Mitzi can't prove it yet that the reason this part of the brain is bigger is that these people learn their nose at the same time that they were rapidly building their vocabulary that is when they were just four to six years old. So I'll go so far as to say that everyone has a fifty-fifty chance of acquiring absolute pitch if they study music when they are very young in a different test schlag found another difference between the brains of musicians and non-musicians, but again learning music at an early age was a critical Factor. For keyboard and string players who started before they turned eight schlaug found that the pathway between the left and right sides of their brains was as much as 15% larger to schlau. The explanation is obvious. It's a question of coordination while The Pianist right hand plays this part of a Beethoven Sonata. The left hand is playing this. Different sides of the brain control each hand, the two sides must talk to each other to keep everything in sync. This time that it takes to transfer information back and forth to coordinate movements of left hand or right hand to make corrections to the necessary. This time is very very critical and it is very critical if you performing for a complicated fast movements of single fingers that you transfer the information very very fast and very efficient slobs work has taken us deeper inside the brains of musicians, but how much do the structural differences help us understand Beethoven's genius or the skill in artistic power of a concert violinist wrong to try to divide the brain in fixed. Mosaics, Oscar Marin is the former Chief of Neurology Good Samaritan Hospital in Portland, Oregon before he became a neurologist. He was a professor of music history and chili his research has focused not on how people respond to individual notes, but how they Respond to chords and Harmony Marin believes our brains are great devices for sorting musical notes into little organized packets for him specific structures matter less than the way a different parts of the brain share information to create inside our heads a model of the music we hear my mother just to be it was a concert pianist and she had the most incredible sight reading she was able to transfer to another Words Be visual drilling into a perceptual acoustic internal representation of the music and from there into motor into the fingers movement. That was really amazing. And I think that this is a skill. This is something that can be at choir can be perfected battery. You have to be born with that and what Marin says talented musicians may be born with are a larger number of links between brain structures that we all share. Although we doubt that. These links can be seen. Marin thinks of them as biochemical Pathways our knowledge of the brain is more detailed now than it ever has been it seems likely that indeed the brains of musicians are special but in what way and how those differences shape how musicians create and experience music that understanding is still a long way off. This is John Greenberg. This is the music of the German composer Robert Schumann. The pieces called David Boonville in Penza and Schumann wrote that it's strains captured the contrasting sides of his temperament the joys and Sorrows that wrestled within him throughout his life. Human is one of many composers who is thought to have suffered from manic depression a mood disorder that includes the soaring highs of mania as well as the despair of depressive illness. There's a long list of artists believed to have had this disorder the composers. Hahnville Mahler Rachmaninoff Tchaikovsky, the painter Vincent van Gogh the writers Ernest Hemingway Herman Melville in Virginia Woolf. Manic depression and its impact on creativity has been the focus of dr. K Jameson's work. She's a professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the author of touch with fire manic-depressive illness and the artistic temperament. Jameson says, there's a significant difference between manic depression and regular depression depression. Is it genetic illness? It runs in families and is characterized by extreme fluctuations and changes in and not only mood but also energy states and perturbance has vegetation creeper manic they get very disturbing can get pretty paranoid extreme variations in terms of sleep patterns. They don't sleep very much at all in their manic they sleep on off a lot when they're depressed and regular depression or clinical depression people have the same very often the same features of depression, but they just don't have the minions associate with it. But I also have great Hodges, right? Not everybody who gets manic has extreme highs and maybe 50% of people who get manic don't ever get euphoric. For example, they don't get ecstatic. They they just get irritable and paranoid and N in terms of being created. Is this something that doctors or artists who who suffer this or doctors who vandalizes feel that? It serves the creative process or inhibits the creative process in which I think was the most complicated as it does. I mean freshen aren't strictly creative. It's rather that if you look at a collection of very very highly creative people you see a way disproportionate rate of manic depression. Looks like Robert Rubin is an example of what led you to the link between Schumann and his manic depression. Was someone who had a lot of manic depression is on family he had suicide in his own family. He himself spent the last two-and-a-half years of his life in an insane asylum after having attempted suicide. And then what you see with shewmon is is what's not uncharacteristic at all in untreated illness, which of course in the 19th century. There was no treatment for manic depression the Tennessee the only supposed to get worse over time if it isn't treated but in the 1840s, was there any treatment whatsoever given to these people other than incarceration available sometimes later in the century are opiates and chloral hydrate and and various drugs that could be used to sedate people up to a point. What are some of the breakthroughs in treating manic depression today? Used to be the lithium was the only drug that was available and it's actually a very good drug and it's perfectly good at preventing suicide, which is a major problem and people who have depression depression, but there are now a wide variety of drugs that were initially used in epilepsy drugs like Depakote Tegretol. There be no 6 7 8 anticonvulsant medications now that are using manic depression feel the artist to poets writers musicians actors that they get treated for these illnesses that they lose some Edge that makes their work unique or their genius or their sparked a couple studies of actually asked artists and writers, whether they feel that they have are as productive or less productive on medication for moods than they were before and actually 3/4 of artists and writers say that they feel that they are as productive or more productive on medication than they were before they start taking Vacation that's because most of these artists and writers were spending a lot of their lives on psychiatric ward or being morbidly depressed in which case nobody's very productive. What about the quarter that they do? Well, what about the court of appeals they don't do well do they feel their work has suffered because of the treatment they feel that they work us effort and they feel like the side effects for the effect on their creativity, but I think was important visit people, you know, if they have a concern about their moods if they have a concern about depression, is it they check it out and they find out they read a lot about it. They get a lot of information. They go bad your doctor's they go ask as many questions as it can ask what all the different treatments are and figure out a treatment course that make sense for them then and I think in this day and age is no reason why creativity does have to suffer. This is been extraordinary talking to you. I want to thank dr. Kay Jamison who is a professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She's the author of touched with fire manic. Vilnius and the artistic temperament. Dr. Jameson. Thank you. Thank you. This next story is for parents who are tired of struggling to get their children to practice the piano. It turns out that all of those hours your kids spend fine-tuning their scales may actually literally fine-tune their minds Ellen Michaelis has this report is the Mozart music at the 95th Street School in South Central Los Angeles arms raised as if they were at a keyboard prepare to wiggle your fingers when the music starts. Performance this year researchers in the University of California at Irvine to play piano. Then they will give the students and IQ tests they help to show that children who have study piano score high in skills related to math and science abilities. Studies were inspired by this a scientists musical model of what the brain may sound like when it sells fire up. Dr. Gordon Shaw is a professor emeritus of physics at UC Irvine. We heard this brain music. Dr. Shah began to wonder if the brain is this good a musician. Naturally what can it do with some training music training. He speculated strengthens the inherent structure of brain getting it in shape for other complex cognitive tasks. We have this common internal neural language that we were born with and so if you can exploit that with the right stimuli, then you're going to help the brain develop to do the things like reason. I'm a reason doctor show investigates is spatial temporal. It is the ability to anticipate how objects will fit together in Space over time. You spatial-temporal reasoning for completing puzzles as we get older it enables us to solve higher math problems or to think several moves ahead while playing chess. Neuroscientist can measure the activity of the living brain using a technology known as EEG the results show that spatial-temporal reasoning tasks activate large areas of the brain does playing music or listening to work by composers with the complexity and symmetry of Mozart. Dr. Shah and a team of researchers are working to demonstrate that music and spatial-temporal reasoning activate the same neural pathways. Music is a totally spatial-temporal activity except that instead of puzzle pieces. The components are notes. No arranged in a specific order in a specific spatial-temporal code. Dr. Francis Rogers and assistant professor of cognitive development at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh since our days at UC Irvine where she worked with Gordon Shaw. She has studied the reasoning abilities of preschool children and kindergarteners. She has evidence that early music training Nathan Sachs shape the developing brain. She is studying rats to explore how this happens. We expose these animals in utero and then 60 days after birth two different types of auditory stimulation and then we ran them in a spatial Maze and sure enough the animals that were exposed to the Mozart completed the maze faster and with fewer errors. And now what we're doing is we're removing their brains so that we can slice them and see their anatomically exactly what has changed is the function of this exposure. So it may be that Intense exposure to the music is a type of enrichment that has similar effects on the spatial area is the hippocampus of the brain. The hippocampus is a tiny seahorse-shaped structure deep within the brain experts in the field of Child Development have not embraced the notion that music training makes kids smarter critics say any conclusion would be premature at this point the data released a date don't convince them that piano lessons do anymore for children, then build musicality motor skills and discipline. A gunshot acknowledges that his findings are preliminary. He says it will take 5 years to prove what he believes to be the case that there is a solid link between early music training and Better Math and Science course, we think that the music training is really doing something very special the improvements have to be exploited and how you teach certain things in school doesn't mean you do away with the standard stuff. This is just a supplement. at the 95th Street School, the second graders wear headphones as they thump away on electronic keyboards oblivious to anything but their own playing possibility that music could Elevate Math and Science course has caught the attention of public policy makers Governor Zell Miller of Georgia. Wanted to be sure that newborns in his State didn't miss out. He recently asked the Georgia legislature to buy each of them a cassette of classical music and dr. Francis realtor estate Wisconsin, a few schools have responded by working music lessons into the public school curriculum earlier in kindergarten doctor voucher says this will help disadvantaged children have the same opportunities that middle-income children do disadvantaged children have been shown to be the most deficit in spatial and abstract reasoning these children also wouldn't normally be able to receive music lessons simply because their parents generally don't have the money they don't have the time and they often don't know that this is something that's important. So what is a parent to make up the research suggesting that music lessons might make your kids smarter. Dr. Rodger says that will sign to sort out the matter parents have nothing to lose by engaging their children and music listen with your infant to compositions with the complexity of Mozart and move your baby's arms and legs and time to it when they're older get them an instrument to play with and if you can enroll them in music lessons in any case as rousers colleague. Dr. Gordon Shaw says the beauty of all this for parents and children is that there are only good side effects. This is Alan Michaelis reporting. What do we mean when we use the term intelligence the more we know about the brain and it's infinitely complex functions, the more the term intelligence seems imprecise. There are multiple intelligences. Similarly brain scientist have come to view the labeled mentally retarded as an exact consider a rare condition called Williams syndrome where individuals with low IQ show an unusual affinity for Sound and Music this condition demonstrates how the Peaks and valleys of our abilities and extend beyond our existing means of measurement Mary Beth Kirchner has this report Revelations in science often come in unpredictable ways unexpected moments for dr. Ursula bellugi a cognitive neuroscientist at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California one such Turning Point came in a late night phone call almost 15 years ago. It would dramatically change the course of her work one evening when somebody called me a woman called me and I answered the phone and she said no I'm trumpski told me to call you so I didn't hang up the phone and it turned out she said my daughter is retarded and may have something interesting for you because she's good language be followed up on the referral from Chomsky but noted linguist and met the girl. She later named her Crystal because she was sort of a crystal ball through which to study a fascinating condition called Williams syndrome only been about 40 years. Since Williams was first described the profile is an unusual one or two. Children have remarkably fluent language, but have great difficulty with spatial tasks like drawing and block design striking abilities in recognizing faces, but difficulty with problem-solving. The average IQ is about 50. One of the unexpected characteristics of Williams which Bellucci found early on with Crystal was a sensitivity to Sound and Music. I think one of the things would surprise me is that the mother told me that she made up songs by yourself. And in fact, the songs were quite beautiful and haunting I played them for some of my music and friends, but then I put that notion away because I didn't know what to do with it. And it wasn't until we met Gloria lenhoff and several of the other children that we began to see that individual Williams may have special abilities like Gloria certainly does Gloria lenhoff has truly special abilities. She has a repertoire of at least a thousand songs, probably two thousand or more but a parent stop counting several years ago in 25 languages. At the same time she has difficulty signing her name. She can't add 4 + 5 Gloria can't read music. But with careful listening to most any recording she can grab the sounds of a foreign language or a new Melody with what seems to be a limitless capacity for new material. I've heard so many operatic soprano sing that song. I hope someday I can learn that one. We came up with that term of their mentally asymmetric that they say they symmetries as it was in brain structure. So they symmetries in their cognitive functions is Gloria's father. Whenever I start talking to parents are groups always start out with in their freshly retired and I use quotation marks and symbols. However, I end up educating then no it's not really true and certain things. Mentally asymmetric is Howard lenhoff and others have come to describe Peaks and valleys of Williams syndrome. It's only been in the last 5 years that researchers to come to understand the basis for this condition through mapping done by molecular geneticist. They believe the condition results from the absence of one very small set of genes on chromosome 7, which gives rise to what looks like a different brain organization the chromosomal deletion in Williams syndrome basically preserves the left hemisphere of the brain and distorts the right people all the parents had guilt until we've probably learned that this microdeletion that occurs is spontaneous thing that occurs all before gestation. So there's nothing that any parent that did wrong during gestation. Now we just got to do is just follow nature and do what we do best. Other researchers like dr. Bellucci caution that there has been little scientific investigation of musical abilities and Williams at the evidence is still mostly anecdotal Howard lenhoff has been convinced of his unusual skill among Williams for years the age of 12, so you're a team. I want to resign for this job. But right now I needed Gloria is now 43 years old lenhoff is retired and a professor emeritus of biological sciences at the University of California at Irvine. He spends much of his time touring with his daughter as she performs around the country sharing from dream changing planes heavy accordion 4Runner performance, and we saw one of these little Tramp stuff we have some and if you take us to fix to meet Asher hop on and we got there when we die Thanksgiving voice of gaseous. He says I am not Spanish and not Mexican into the Bosnian zagoria started singing a song that he knew and he sort of started to cry and start singing with her it was supposed to do so Play Club. Lenhoff is certain that his daughter is not alone in her musical prowess five years ago. He co-founded a music camp in the Berkshires near Tanglewood where some 40 individuals with William Syndrome have gone to perform and study for one week each summer. Dr. Bellucci and a few colleagues attended the camp finding the students consumed with music singing in groups, even as they walk between classes many played by ear and improvised one was a prolific songwriter and multiple campers had perfect pitch. Williams syndrome represents a whole new frontier of brain research and while the studies of neuroscientists evolved Gloria lenhoff and others continue to Simply astound and educate audiences with their music. And parents to like Howard lenhoff persist as catalysts for attracting scientists to this field. By studying this one population to see how they can understand how their brain functions and music process music. It may help us understand. How hours does an effect one of the rules in experimental biology which I grew up in is that you want to study the normal you study send in a typical system. If you want to study how people understand music study those who don't do other things well, but who is selling music that's a challenge where we were putting forth to the scientist. I Mary Beth Kirchner a child with Williams syndrome once said music is my favorite way of thinking. As we've heard in this past our music has become a favorite way of thinking for an expanding group of neuroscientists. They're trying to look inside the brain to see how it listens to interprets and digests music their search is just beginning, but eventually they hope to figure out exactly how are gray matter clings to a melody or song and why it is the human beings breathe in music as surely and as harmonically as they breathe in there. I'm Mandy Patinkin. Percocet or transcripted this program gray matters music in the brain or for free pamphlet called Unlocking The Mysteries of the brain call one eight hundred six five brain. That's one 865 brain. This program was produced in association with the Dana Alliance for brain initiatives and independent activists organization created by the Charles a Dana foundation in 1993 to Champion. The public stake in Brain Research. Its mission is to Advanced education about the personal and public benefits of brain research today the alliance brings together more than 170 neuroscientists including sex Nobel laureates. This program was produced by Mary Beth Kirchner and Robert ran with engineering support from the shake for chick and production assistants from Emily bottine a project manager with Kathy Moore special. Thanks to Phil Shuman Professor, Donald Hodges. And dr. Guy. Mckhann. PRI Public Radio International that does it for our midday program today like to thank you for tuning in. If you missed part of today's documentary presentation on music in the brain Or would simply like to hear the program again will be rebroadcasting the screen matters documentary at 9 tonight here on Minnesota Public Radio. Programming on Minnesota Public Radio is supported by Cooperative power providing electricity to 17 member Cooperative serving customers throughout West Central and Southern Minnesota. That doesn't 2 for midday today Gary I can hear again. Thanks for tuning in and we hope you can join us tomorrow. I'm Lorna Benson tune into the next All Things Considered for a wrap-up of all the day's top national International and Regional stories All Things Considered weekdays at 3 on Minnesota Public Radio know know FM 91.1 You're listening to Minnesota Public Radio. We have some rain 37° in a Northeast wind at 21 Gus 225 at 10 o w FM 91.1 Minneapolis and st. 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