Through the Mind’s Eye

Remember a study that found listening to a Mozart piano sonata for 10 minutes could raise college students’ IQs? And the one that claimed early musical training could enhance an infant’s learning ability?

That line of research, first announced in 1993, is still going strong. Last week, at an Orange County Museum of Art panel--billed variously as “Art in the Brain” and “Art on the Brain”--one of the UC Irvine scientists associated with the “Mozart effect” study marshaled a plethora of charts and graphs for a rapid-fire presentation.

The haste was obligatory because the five panelists--scientists specializing in brain-related fields and a comparative literature professor who investigates the psychology of literature and visual art--had only 20 minutes apiece in the afternoon session to make a case for his or her research.

The event--presented by the Museum Council, a support group of the institution--was a cross between a seminar for the intellectually curious and a plaintive call to a well-heeled audience for research funding.

James H. Fallon, chairman of the College of Medicine faculty at UCI, served as the ebullient master of ceremonies. He outlined an ambitious program of insights into the brains of artists and their audiences.

The development in the past few years of brain imaging has made it possible to study comprehensively what is going on in there, Fallon said. Flashing colorful slides produced from PET scans (short for positron emission tomography), he explained how the patches of red indicate intense brain activity.

Neuroscientists believe creativity is universal, Fallon said, and that each of us has a unique system of transmitters that regulate brain activity. Yet most people are inhibited from tapping into their creative powers, he said.

On the nature-versus-nurture question--whether the brain’s structure and function is genetically encoded or molded by experience--Fallon said most neuroscientists believe 80% of a person’s IQ, personality and so forth is based in genetics.

“That implies how good you are as an artist depends on who you are genetically,” Fallon said. “You can be very creative and very inhibited. . . . The artistic brain may be abnormal because restraints are lifted.”

Art as Brain Decoder

The most striking presentation, reflecting research by a 27-year-old Japanese woman with doctorate degrees in computer music, biomedical engineering and artificial intelligence, involved studies of paintings made by people with brain disorders.

Junko Hara-Shankle--whose work was discussed by her husband, William Rodman Shankle, to spare the audience her slightly faltering English--hit on the notion of using a visual feature of these people’s artworks to help decode their brain function.

Looking at a painting, a viewer sees color, texture, outlines, edges, angles and so forth. To begin her research, Hara-Shankle decided to concentrate on just one feature of paintings: their spatial contrast, or spatial frequency.

In nature, and in natural-looking paintings, it’s easy to see individual objects because of the larger areas of contrasting areas of color (in other words, the low frequency at which areas of color alternate).

Hara-Shankle scanned into a computer pictures of more than 200 paintings by famous and obscure artists known or believed to have suffered from brain disorders. She wrote a computer program to calculate the differences in frequency between each spot (or pixel) of paint and the one alongside it, and then determined how much low-, middle- and high-frequency activity occurs in each painting.

What she discovered was that, during periods of major depression (Joan Miro, Mark Rothko) or schizophrenia (a patient at a state hospital in the 1950s), or influenced by the symptoms of Alzheimer’s (Willem de Kooning), the artists’ paintings exhibited major declines in high spatial contrast.

De Kooning, whose memory loss--a feature of middle-stage Alzheimer’s--didn’t surface until 1980, was an interesting case. The Abstract Expressionist artist had a history of compulsive personality disorder, Shankle said, and was a heavy drinker.

The work for which he is best known shows high spatial frequency activity similar to that of a schizophrenic. In a work from 1970, these “blips” in the graph are gone.

“Is this an indication of Alzheimer’s?” Shankle asked. “Or is it a sign that his compulsive personality disorder was disappearing? Or did he forget to be compulsive?”

A gust of laughter swept through the audience, obviously pleased for a bit of relief from the onslaught of technical information.

Alzheimer’s can set in as early as 30 years before the first symptoms (usually memory loss) appear, said Shankle, who specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of the disease. (His web site, https://www.AdaptHealthCare.com, is linked to the Newport Beach treatment center of that name, which he heads.)

Mozart-Fueled Learning

Upbeat news on the Mozart-as-mental-juice front came after a curious foray into synesthesia (bodily displaced sensory experiences, such as hearing color) with Ellen J. Esrock, associate professor of literature at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. To illustrate uninhibited, creative ways of viewing art, she encouraged the audience to “feel” the outline of a shell photograph by Edward Weston and to “exhale” the lines of Edvard Munch’s famous “The Cry.”

Gordon L. Shaw, a physicist and president of the Music Intelligence Neural Development Institute (MIND) at UCI (https://www.MINDinst.org), emphasized the real-world use of data from the Mozart studies.

“Music can enhance how you think because it comes from the structured brain,” Shaw said.

When limited funding hampered initial studies of 3-year-old children given piano lessons--conducted by Frances Rauscher, Shaw’s then-assistant--she investigated the possible benefits of listening to music rather than performing it.

After hearing 200 works by Mozart, she chose his Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major (K. 448), the piece that, Shaw said, has been used by MIND in all subsequent Mozart experiments.

Why that piece, someone in the audience asked.

“If I knew, I’d be in Stockholm right now,” Shaw cracked, referring to the seat of the Nobel Prize committee.

The sonata was selected because it is “very cerebral, not emotional,” he said. “It’s not easily hummable.”

A 1993 experiment involved three randomly assigned groups of UCI students. After listening to silence (group 1), music by Philip Glass (group 2) or the first 10 minutes of the Mozart sonata (group 3), the students were asked to mentally manipulate intricately folded and cut pieces of paper.

Group 3 scored significantly higher in short-term spatiotemporal reasoning skills, Shaw said. (The MIND Institute brochure explains that this type of reasoning, crucial for learning math, “involves maintaining and transforming mental images [without] a physical image.”)

Shaw said he plans to import a more recent experiment--conducted at the inner-city 93rd Street School in Los Angeles--to “advantaged” kids at three Orange County elementary schools to been selected.

In this study, 34 second-graders had six months of piano keyboard training; control groups had lessons in group singing, computer-based language training, spatial recognition or nothing at all. The children simultaneously played a specially developed computer game that teaches math and science concepts using spatiotemporal reasoning.

The piano students, Shaw said, were the only ones to show a marked mental development, zooming from average scores to above the 85th percentile.

“It does make a difference,” Shaw exclaimed with a messianic vigor. “That’s the bottom line.”