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Gordon Shaw the physicist, 66, and colleagues have discovered what’s known as the "Mozart effect," the ability of a Mozart sonata, under the right circumstances, to improve the listener’s mathematical and reasoning abilities. But the findings are controversial and have launched all kinds of crank notions about using music to make kids smarter. The hype, he warns, has gotten out of hand.
But first, the essence: Is there something about the brain cells work to explain the effect In 1978 the neuroscientist Vernon Mountcastle devised a model of the neural structure of the brain’s gray matter. Looking like a thick band of colorful bead work, it represents the firing patterns of groups of neurons. Building on Mounteastle, Shaw and his team constructed a model of their own. On a lark, Xiaodan Leng, who was Shaw’s colleague at the time, used a synthesizer to translate these patterns into music. What came out of the speakers wasn’t exactly toe-tapping, but it was music. Shaw and Leng inferred that music and brain-wave activity are built on the same sort of patterns.
"Gordon is a contrarian in his thinking," says his longtime friend, Nobel Prize-winning Stanford physicist Martin Peri. "That’s important. In new areas of science, such as brain research, nobody knows how to do it."
What do neuroscientists and psychologists think of Shaw’s findings’ They haven’t condemned it, but neither have they confirmed it. Maybe you have to take them with a grain of salt, but the experiments by Shaw and his colleagues are intriguing. In March a team led by Shaw announced that young children who had listened to the Mozart sonata and studied the piano over a period of months improved their scores by 27% on a test of ratios and proportions. The control group against which they were measured received compatible enrichment courses--minus the music. The Mozart-trained kids are now doing math three grade levels ahead of their peers, Shaw claims.
Proof of all this, of course, is necessarily elusive because it can be difficult to do a double- blind experiment of educational techniques. In a double-blind trial of an arthritis drug, neither the study subjects nor the experts evaluating them know which ones got the test treatment and which a dummy pill. How do you keep the participants from knowing it’s Mozart on the CD

The most important condition for the Mozart-trained kids to outsmart the control group is ().