Build Your Baby's Brain Through the Power of Music

MUSIC, CHILDREN
AND BRAIN POWER

Every parent knows the thrill that results when "for the first time" a baby hears a sound and turns toward it with a slight movement of the head. This response, which can usually be observed clearly by the end of the first month of life, lies at the heart of exciting new research that suggests that music may help to boost a child's brain power.

For a long time, experts believed that infants could not hear until they were about four weeks old. Newborn babies' nervous systems, they thought, had not developed enough to take in the symphony of sounds that surrounds them. But recently scientists have confirmed a fact that will come as no surprise to anyone who has ever noticed that in a hospital nursery, when one baby begins to cry, others do, too. From the moment of birth, babies hear well enough to have a preference for certain sounds over others.

Pitched to Babies
Scientists have long known that the human brain has two hemispheres organized to serve different functions. The right hemisphere specializes in processing information in a spontaneous or intuitive way, as do people when they respond to art or music. The left hemisphere processes information in a linear or sequential way, as in counting or writing.

Which half of the brain do babies prefer?
"Interestingly, existing evidence suggests that infants have not yet differentiated these learning styles," writes Dr. S.H. Jacob, former chairman of the Department of Education at the University of Maryland, in Your Baby's Mind. "However, all seem to start with a preference for right-brain kinds of actions and perceptions, preferring curvatures to angular space, responding to rhymes and music, and showing interest in patterns and wholes, not parts or segments of things. These observations point to the ability of the human brain to perceive, react, act on and construct knowledge... At a very early age, baby's mind is resilient and ready to make sense of his surroundings."

All of this suggests that even infants may benefit from exposure to classical music. Scientists have found that babies respond to changes in pitch. Very young infants brighten when you speak to them in a higher-pitched voice not because they understand your words but because they recognize a change in pitch and know it has been directed to them. Classical music -- with its rich variety of changes in pitch, tone and melody -- can help to provide the varied stimuli a baby needs in order to thrive in the first year of life, when the brain develops faster than at any other time. At least one study has found that music can also aid in memory retrieval.

Researchers from Iona College and St. John's University found that three-month-old infants learned to move an overhead crib mobile when one of two works of music was played. When the mobile's stand was attached to an ankle by a ribbon, the babies quickly realized that they could "make music" by kicking. This pattern suggests that music can help with one of an infant's most important tasks: remembering new information.

Benefits for Older Children
What about older children? Some evidence suggests that even children with extremely complex learning difficulties -- such as autistics -- may improve with exposure to music. After eight weeks of music therapy, an autistic seven-year-old girl in Florida began using five- to seven-word sentences to communicate for the first time. Rachael Harrell had relied on an occasional word and on nonverbal communication, such as gestures and hand signals, until she enrolled in a 10-week pilot program co-sponsored by the Andrew Bromberg Foundation and Stetson University. Rachael's teacher, Vicky Gross, has used music to motivate her to speak in longer sentences, allowing her to play the piano longer when she uses complete sentences. "This approach emphasizes the therapeutic part of music, which is a tremendous power for these children and children with disabilities," Rachael's father, David, said. "It's a giant step."

The Mozart Effect
Even for children who do not face such big learning challenges, listening to classical music may confer other advantages. Some research shows that certain kinds of music may help to steady a too rapid heartbeat. The average heart beats about 70 times per minute. So a child whose pulse is racing because of the approach of a big test may benefit from hearing music played at a soothing tempo, such as an adagio, that approximates that of the human heart. But perhaps the most interesting studies have implications for parents who want help their children prepare for college. This research supports the view that listening to music can increase the ability of students to perform complex tasks of spatial reasoning.

Three researchers -- Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw and Katherine Ky -- gave college students standard tests of spatial reasoning after the students had been exposed to each of three conditions for ten minutes: listening to Mozart (the Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major, K488, as performed by Murray Perahia and Radu Lupu in their Sony Classical recording SK 39511), listening to a relaxation tape or silence. The students' performance improved more after listening to Mozart than after the other two conditions. The researchers chose Mozart's music because they believe that its structure aids cognitive processing in the brain, and they believe that not all kinds of music would work as well: if music lacks sufficient complexity or variety, it might interfere with abstract reasoning.

The rising scientific interest in the effects of music on children suggests that we may soon learn of many other benefits of Mozart. In the 1950s, Dr. Spock told parents, "You know more than you think you do." But -- when it comes to classical music -- the lesson of the 1990s might turn out to be, "Your children know more than you think they do, too."

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