莫扎特效應-音樂治療法
The Mozart Effect

We could hear the monk chanting in the morning.
我們聽得到僧侶在早晨誦經。

Due to the restaurant's popularity at the weekends, reservations are recommended.
這間餐廳每到週末人氣超旺，所以用餐前需要預約。

The therapist told us we have to keep our grandparents company; they will be healthier than living in loneliness.
治療師告訴我們要多陪伴祖父母，這樣他們會比獨居生活更健康。

Mary refused to do the chemotherapy because she’s afraid of the side effects.
Mary拒絕化療，因為她害怕化療所產生的後遺症。

This album is a compilation of Beatles’ greatest hits on billboards.
這張專輯收錄了披頭四在告示牌雜誌上的熱門歌曲。

My father has suffered from migraine for a long time.
我父親長期以來飽受偏頭痛的折磨。

There's a correlation between smoking and lung cancer.
吸菸與肺癌彼此間是有關聯的。

Watching TV series is one of my favorite relaxations.
看電視影集是我最愛的休閒之一。

There is no data to accept or refute this hypothesis.
沒有任何資料可以支持或否定這項假設。

The serious car accident has done the damage to Bill’s neural system.
這場嚴重的車禍傷害了 Bill 的神經系統。

The Mozart Effect

Music has been used for centuries to heal the body. In the Ebers Papyrus (one of the earliest medical documents, circa 1550 B.C.), it was recorded that physicians chanted to heal the sick (Castleman, 1994). In various cultures, we have observed singing as part of healing rituals. In the world of Western medicine, however, using music in medicine lost popularity until the introduction of the radio. Researchers then started to notice that listening to music could have significant physical effects. Therapists noticed music could help calm anxiety and researchers saw that listening to music could cause a drop in blood pressure. In addition to these two areas, music has been used with cancer chemotherapy to reduce nausea, during surgery to reduce stress hormone production, during childbirth, and in stroke recovery (Castleman, 1994 and Westley, 1998). It has been shown to decrease pain as well as enhance the effectiveness of the immune system. In Japan, compilations of music are used as medication of sorts. For example, if you want to cure a headache or migraine, the album suggested is Mendelssohn’s ‘Spring Song’, Dvorak's ‘Humoresque’, or part of George Gershwin’s ‘An American in Paris’ (Campbell, 1998). Music is also being used to assist in learning, in a phenomenon called the Mozart Effect.

Frances H. Rauscher, Ph.D., first demonstrated the correlation between music and learning in an experiment in 1993. His experiment indicated that a 10-minute dose of Mozart could temporarily boost intelligence. Groups of students were given intelligence tests after listening to silence, relaxation tapes, or Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major for a short time. He found that after silence, the average IQ score was 110, and after the relaxation tapes, score rose a point. After listening to Mozart, however, the score jumped to 119 (Westley, 1998). Even students who did not like the music still had an increased score in the IQ test. Rauscher hypothesised that “listening to complex, non-repetitive music, like Mozart, may stimulate neural pathways that are important in thinking” (Castleman, 1994).

The same experiment was repeated on rats by Rauscher and Hong Hua Li from Stanford. Rats also demonstrated enhancement in their intelligence performance. These new studies indicate that rats that were exposed to Mozart showed “increased gene expression of BDNF (a neural growth factor), CREB (a learning and memory compound), and Synapsin I (a synaptic growth protein) ” in the brain’s hippocampus, compared with rats in the control group, which heard only white noise (e.g. the whooshing sound of a radio tuned between stations).

How exactly does the Mozart effect work? Researchers are still trying to determine the actual mechanisms for the formation of these enhanced learning pathways.

Neuroscientists suspect that music can actually help build and strengthen connections between neurons in the cerebral cortex in a process similar to what occurs in brain development despite its type. When a baby is born, certain connections have already been made—like connections for heartbeat and breathing. As new information is learned and motor skills develop, new neural connections are formed. Neurons that are not used will eventually die while those used repeatedly will form strong connections. Although a large number of these neural connections require experience, they must also occur within a certain time frame. For example, a child born with cataracts cannot develop connections within the visual cortex. If the cataracts are removed by surgery right away, the child’s vision develops normally. However, after the age of 2, if the cataracts are removed, the child will remain blind because those pathways cannot establish themselves.