By Meghan Streit
THE ERICKSON TRIBUNE

The effects of music on our lives are undeniable. Music can change our moods, bring back vivid memories, or completely alter the vibe in a room. But can music actually make us smarter?

The answer is yes, according  to several studies published last year by the New York Academy of Sciences.

Train your brain with music
The theory, called the “Mozart Effect,” purports that listening to classical music can train your brain to perform better on cognitive tests.

“It is well known that music or rhyme can help us to remember stories or lists of information, like the alphabet,” author Linda Wilbrecht writes in her report of the studies. “Musical recitation may directly affect the brain by changing the temporal properties of neural networks.

That is, music may change and even entrain the rhythm of the electrochemical tune constantly playing in the brain.”

Studies have shown that musical training and exposure to complex music can have a host of beneficial effects on human cognition, from enhancing special reasoning to honing math skills to improving memory.

The “Mozart Effect” has gained so much traction in pop psychology that many expectant parents have started playing classical music during pregnancy in hopes of giving their offspring an intellectual advantage from the start.

Build your ‘grey matter’
But it’s not just babies that benefit from exposure to classical music. Children and even adults also stand to gain from musical study.

Scientists Patrick Bermudez and Robert Zatorre conducted MRI scans on human subjects to measure gross anatomy and locate centers of brain activity, Wilbrecht reports. They found “more grey matter in the auditory cortex of the right hemisphere in musicians compared to non-musicians.”

Jumping on the “Mozart Effect” bandwagon, a group of retirees at Sedgebrook have enrolled in a course called “Listening to and Understanding Great Music.”