Question on music & its effect.

[murulidhara]

1. I read in some articles that music cures some diseases. There are also musical therapy in some hospitals. Can music cure or it will helps in curing.

2. Does music has any effect on growth of plants?

[Sisyphus]

1. No, it doesn't cure any diseases. It might be therapeutic, though, inasmuch as it can have a calming and cheering effect, which certainly can't hurt, especially with mental health issues.

 

2. I've never heard of that and I can't find anything about it. I can't imagine how it would, though.

[insane_alien]

1/ it doesn't cure anything, except maybe depression if your listening to 'feelgood' songs

 

2/ yes, it can actually effect the growth of plants, the vibrations stimulate it or something(can't remember the exact effect from the paper) though the same effect can be achieved by anything from an earthquake to a noisy toddler. its just the vibrations that count, they have an extremely broad taste

[1veedo]

2/ yes, it can actually effect the growth of plants, the vibrations stimulate it or something(can't remember the exact effect from the paper) though the same effect can be achieved by anything from an earthquake to a noisy toddler. its just the vibrations that count, they have an extremely broad taste

I saw this on mythbusters -- "plausible"

 

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6609068041106073533

 

The experiment actually confirms what you're saying insane_alien. It didn't matter if you spoke mean or nice to the plants they both grew the same. Best performer: heavy metal, presumably because it had the most sound vibrations. The worst performer was in complete silence -- no vibration at all.

 

Sadly there isn't a lot of information out there about this. Google gives you a bunch of bogus results -- no real science can be found anywhere about this. It'd be nice if someone knew of some peer-review on this subject.

 

edit -- Not sure what to make of all this. I have to go so I'll read this study latter. The results section indicates that music doesn't seem to help plants at all.

 

http://www.jstor.org/view/00063568/ap040014/04a00170/0

[Guest026]

I heard that listening to music when you're young can make you smarter.

[1veedo]

Not really. Music can increase you focus and mood some which can make you score a little better or tests but it wont really make you smarter.

[iNow]

You're probably thinking about the Mozart effect, most commonly attributed to neural development in infants:

 

http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/mozarteffect2.shtml

[1veedo]

Skeptics dictionary:

 

Mozart Effect

 

Listening to Mozart or other classical music does not make you smarter.

[someguy]

personally i'm very skeptical of that also. i don't think doing anything or showing anything to an infant can make it smarter. maybe it can make it something else, but to me, smartness is genetic. education is not. but people often say smart when in my opinion they mean knowledgeable. so i guess it would depend on what you define smart to be.

 

but... I guess its possible that in the construction phase of the brain that something about the music causes the brain to grow in a manner that is smartness... but i tend to think not. if it did, why mozart? why not some other music?

 

if it were true... and i had to find a reason why mozart and not contemporary music, i would say it is because there are so many instruments doing different things all at once and listening to that music can help train your mind to concentrate on multiple things at once without effort. but still, i don't think.

 

but do the people that promote this effect claim it is Mozart and only mozart that helps? it seems that learning music was also a factor but i fail to see the difference between learning music or any other language. standard notation, math, any written language seem to require all the same functions, so it would not surprise me that learning many of these at a young age would help you to learn more later on with more ease. but that does not isolate music as a cause. i think if they would have done their experiment with music and chinese, instead of computers and nothing, their findings may have been different. the chinese learners and piano learners i would guess would end up with similar results, perhaps the chinese learners would have even better results due to the complexity of their character based writing system. also there is a natural skew that needs to exist unless your sample group is really really huge.

[1veedo]

but... I guess its possible that in the construction phase of the brain that something about the music causes the brain to grow in a manner that is smartness... but i tend to think not. if it did, why mozart? why not some other music?

That actually is the case. I forget what it's called exactly but in psychology you learn that a developing brain changes based on outside stimulation. There was an experiment for example done on mice. One mouse was a sad mouse with nothing to do and the other had plenty of environmental stimulation. When they cut open their brains the "happy mouse" had more neural connections than the sad one.

 

So there is a little bit of basis for the hypothesis that maybe music (in general, not just mozart) could make a child smarter, but the research suggests that this isn't actually the case. The problem with this is that companies take advantage of parents (*cough* moms) and sell them mozart/beethovan cds to make their children smarter (my parents even did this lol) but it's just false advertising. The moral of the story is that you might as well not waste your money.

 

And you are right that almost all of intelligence is genetically determined.

[someguy]

That actually is the case. I forget what it's called exactly but in psychology you learn that a developing brain changes based on outside stimulation. There was an experiment for example done on mice. One mouse was a sad mouse with nothing to do and the other had plenty of environmental stimulation. When they cut open their brains the "happy mouse" had more neural connections than the sad one.

 

So there is a little bit of basis for the hypothesis that maybe music (in general, not just mozart) could make a child smarter, but the research suggests that this isn't actually the case. The problem with this is that companies take advantage of parents (*cough* moms) and sell them mozart/beethovan cds to make their children smarter (my parents even did this lol) but it's just false advertising. The moral of the story is that you might as well not waste your money.

 

And you are right that almost all of intelligence is genetically determined.

 

agreed, but i think that more neurons does not necessarily indicate more intelligence. memories are made of neurons also, so it would be necessary i think if i'm not mistaken, that a mouse isolated in a dark room since birth, and a mouse that experiences many stimuli, not just music, or even not music at all, but all sorts of smells and touches and visual things, would have a more complex brain structure the same way they discovered. or is what they found known to be different in some way?

 

but they seem to specify young ages, when you could provide an old human being with an equal amount of new experiences, though children like they are talking about are experiencing things for the first time, so they would need to be building new neurons. maybe you could do the same experiment with an adult and get the same results so long as you make sure all of their experiences are brand new.