“Researchers report the soothing sounds of a Mozart minuet boosts the ability of children and seniors to focus on a task and ignore extraneous information,” writes Tom Jacobs in Monday’s (6/24) Pacific Standard (Santa Barbara, CA). “Dissonant music has the opposite effect, according to Nobuo Masataka of Japan’s Kyoto University and Leonard Perlovsky of Harvard University.… In the journal Scientific Reports, the researchers describe an experiment featuring 25 boys (ages eight and nine), and 25 seniors (ages 65 to 75). All completed a modified version of the well-known Stroop task, in which a word spelling out a color is presented in a different color (such as ‘red’ written with green letters).… Participants performed the test three times: Once while a simple Mozart minuet played in the background, once while listening to a modified version of the piece featuring many ‘dissonant intervals,’ and once in silence…. Compared to working in silence, their reaction times were significantly quicker, and their error rates were lower, when the original Mozart piece was played…. This new research augments a study released last year by the same team, which found listening to Mozart helps us cope with cognitive dissonance—the deep discomfort we feel when we realize two of our beliefs are at odds.”
Posted June 26, 2013
