Back in 1993, one research found that after a group of students listened to one Mozart piano sonata for 10 minutes, they experienced an improvement in their spatial reasoning skills, more than they did after they listened to relaxation instructions for reduction of blood pressure or nothing at all.
Moreover, the students’ IQ scores increased by eight or nine points.
This soon became known as the Mozart effect. Although the advantages were hard to reproduce and disappeared within several minutes, this gave birth to the fad of Mozart for the brain development of babies.
This same research also posited that listening to the Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major helped epileptic patients by lowering their neuron activity spikes associated with seizures. At the time, these results weren’t consistent enough to be replicated.
But today, 28 years fast forward, new methods are encouraging the chance of music being the calm that the brain needs.
Mozart’s Sonata: Key for Epileptic Seizures?
According to the research that is published in the Scientific Reports journal, listening to the sonata for at least 30 seconds may have to do with reduced spikes of electrical activity. This was seen in the brains of people with epilepsy whose disease didn’t respond to meds.
There were 16 patients in the study and their spikes were reduced by 2/3s throughout the brain, but mostly in the left and right frontal cortices of the brain. These are the areas where our emotional responses are regulated.
The lead author of the study and a graduate student at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, Robert Quon, explains that a higher number of these spikes has been linked with loss of memory or diminished cognitive outcome and a higher frequency of seizures.
Quon added that the team approached the idea of the sonata helping reduce the spikes with a dose of healthy skepticism.
This state of mind continues since a lot of questions have appeared from this paper. They hope to answer more of them in the upcoming years.
What Is so Special about this Particular Mozart Sonata?
The researchers didn’t just play the Mozart sonata to the participants, but rather nine different types of music.
They modulated the Mozart sonata with the gamma tone. They tried out music from various genres and patients could then choose the song they liked the most.
The researchers used a machine learning technique and a music information retrieval technique to break the song into parts.
They also predicted that the transitions out of the longer segments would lead to stronger power in the brain’s emotion networks. This is exactly what happened in the analysis, added Quon.
What Are the Plans for the Future?
The researchers want to see how various elements of the music itself play a role in encouraging these positive effects.
They eventually hope to define an anti-epileptic genre so that listening to music from that playlist will help epileptic people lower their seizure frequency.
Sources:
