Classical Music = Improved Thought?

Many people claim that they think better when listening to music. I once heard of a study that showed that most people who said so did not, in fact, think better when listening to music, and only wanted to think so so that they could listen to the music they love. However, the study found that classical music, as an exception, was the only type of music which could actually allow you to think better if you played it while performing some function.

Does anybody else know where I can find this study? Are these facts true? I don’t claim that AC/DC improves my thinking, but if putting on Beethoven can make me win more chess games, I want to know.

Joey

Metal tends to make me drive more agressively…

You might find this article on the Mozart effect interesting.

Awhile ago I read one of those “Double Your Brain Power!!!” books, which was filled with cheap tricks like this (listen to classical music if you want to remember more of your reading, etc.)…tricks that work to some extent, but not for the reasons that the “researchers" cite. To invent a silly example, if I “put on my thinking cap” before I start reading a book (by literally putting on a hat labeled “Thinking Cap”), I think we’d get an increase in performance, not because there are any special properties of this hat, but because I’m creating a ritual for myself where I’m being more attentive, thoughtful, serious about my work, etc. Mozart, in our culture, signals taste, seriousness, upper-class values, etc…listening to Mozart would probably make a kid feel like he’s in a museum, therefore, should be on his best behavior, which would give us the side effect of an improved performance, even if there’s nothing about the music itself that causes increased smarts.

“The governors of Tennessee and Georgia have started programs which give a Mozart CD to every newborn. Hundreds of hospitals were given free CDs of classical music in May of 1999 by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences Foundation.” (from the page posted by ultrafilter)

This is amazing…makes me wonder what would happen if hospitals were giving away free Queen CDs to every newborn…

It depends . . . when one of my kids was in middle school they did an experiment with mice (although who cares what makes mice think better, and do they think at all?). A control group learned a maze with no music. The other two groups attempted to learn the maze while listening to either Mozart or Metallica. The mice who listened to music, in general, learned the maze faster, although not much faster. It didn’t seem to matter whether they were in the Mozart or the Metallica group. Some mice in the group learned much faster than others. In both groups there were mice who just gave up, or who cheated by climbing over the maze.

I personally would rather not hear music when I’m doing some tasks, and want bouncy music when doing others. Listening to rock and roll definitely improves my sports performance, though. Unfortunately, when listening in my car, it also makes me exceed the speed limit.

When working in a corporate office environment, I found that listening to classical music made me less likely to tear out the larynx of the lying SOB salesman who had made a job impossible to install at a profit.

Well, no one said classical music was perfect.

As a (mostly non-classical) musician myself, I do notice that classical musicians who post to newsgroups or bulletin boards are generally more goody-goody than anyone out there, with the exception of fundamentalist Christians.