Mozart Effect Take 2: Finally Some Clarity!

'If you want music to sharpen your senses, boost your ability to focus and perhaps even improve your memory, you need to be a participant, not just a listener.'

This is the opening line in an article by Melissa Healy regarding a follow study by Frances Rauscher in 1993. Her findings set off a commercial frenzy of products to make baby geniuses — all she says 'from an experiment that had college students, not babies, listen to Mozart — and were "grossly misapplied and over-exaggerated".'

The Los Angeles Times article titled 'Playing along with the Mozart effect' states 'for all its beauty, power and capacity to move, researchers have concluded that music is little more than ear candy for the brain if it is consumed only passively. If you want music to sharpen your senses, boost your ability to focus and perhaps even improve your memory, the latest word from science is you'll need more than hype and a loaded iPod.

You gotta get in there and play. Or sing, bang or pluck.

For those receiving musical instruction, "there is evidence that music changes the brain in positive and permanent ways," says Laurel Trainor, professor of psychology, neuroscience and behavior, and director of the auditory development lab of McMaster University in Toronto. Yet like a medication that powerfully treats an illness, but in mysterious ways, the means by which music might enhance cognitive powers has eluded scientists so far.

Click here to read the full article and get out there and play!