Draft3: The Cognitive Effects of Music

This topic submitted by Laura Fink, Sophia Turczynewycz, Eric McGary, Ashlae Shepler, John Drain (dafinkster@hotmail.com) at 10:52 pm on 10/4/01. Additions were last made on Friday, April 19, 2002. Section: Cummins

Introduction

Our ability to recall external stimuli is an essential component for functioning in society. We depend on the vividness of our memories for everything that we experience. Even the most mundane aspects of our daily lives: our relationships with others, school performance, and remembering where we parked our car, all of these are dependent on the imprints left in our brain of sensory interpretations. What we observe through our senses becomes filtered through the brain through electochemical connections between brain cells that are quick to disappear. To spare these observations from oblivion we employ certain mnemonic devices, be it consious or unconscious, to resuscitate the fleeting memory.

Exploritorium

Mnemonic devices are crucial in our communication with one another. For instance, to remember a phone number transmitted orally we often recite it several times in our head, a conscious process of regenerating the memory. This breed of mnemonic device is not exclusive to the auditory senses. To remember an image, such as a persons face, we revisualize patterns constructed from an unconscious internal repetition of that particular image. C.D. Woody, describing the nature of the mnemonic device in his book Memory, Learning, and Higher Function: A Cellular View , states, "The network operates through labeled interconnections linking specific elements within the network and through the mechanisms that underlie each element's adaptation. The adaptive features are crucial to learning and imply some associated, underlying mnemonic process." Thus, the ability to recall such patterns are aided greatly by subconscious associations of a multitude of seperate and distinct sensory inputs.

Given that associations of different impulses increase the rate of remembrance, we propose that cooridnating music with information increases the probability that memories become triggered. Data seems to reinforce this as, "Researchers found that inner city school children's reasoning skills that tested below the U.S. average doubled after listening to music" (prevention Magazine, Feb. 1994). Music cannot be viewed as a single entity, however. There are many subdivisions within music, each with often drastically different tones and rhythms. We concur with Kristian David Olson, author of "The Effects of Music on the Mind," in her appraisal that the music, "needs to be implemented correctly... for if it isn't, it can be very distracting to the mind." This lab will explore the possibility that particular varieties of music are more conductive to aiding the acuity of ones memory than others. The music of Mozart for example, with it's sonorous and slow paced rhythmic structure, has been reputed to be exceptionally beneficial to enhancing cognitive abilities. Gordon Logan and Geoffrey L. Collier observed the effects of rhymic stimuli on memory through a series of experiments in "Modality Differences in Short-term Memory for Rhythms." A "good rhythm" is one that was found to be conducive to aiding the memory. They found that "multimodal patterns do not form good rhythms because they are not heard as single streams." We predict that subdued music with steady fluctuations of rhythm will yield more positive effects on ones cognitive ability than that of brash, highly fluctuating, "big beat" music.

18th Century Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Relevance

Everyone listens to music. People listen to it as they drive on the highway, when they take a shower, when they wake up in the morning or when they go to bed at night. Music is an intergral part of our lives affecting anything from our moods to stress levels to motivations. For our project, being students ourselves, we wanted to look more closely at the effects of music on our study habits. With this information, two questions arise: what are the other effects of music in our lives and what else can enhance our study habits? These questions then lead to a much broader investigation into the function of the brain and how it receives and process information.

In an article titled, The Effects of Music on the Mind, author of Kristian David Olsen tells us that "listening to music as background can help when people when [sic] they're thinking, learning, or working..." and goes on to explain a study conducted with different types of music and how it affected medical performance. In another article, The Effects of Music Upon Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition , by Susan L. Medina, PhD, more studies were conducted dealing with the effects of music and the rate of learning in children.

Because music is such an integral part of our lives, studies are constantly being conducted to understand the ways music affects us. By interpreting the data from our study, as well as the data and results from previous studies, we will be able to see the effects music has on the human mind.

Materials
Dr. Seuss's Oh, The Places We Will Go, CD player, CD, stopwatch, 25 participants

Methods
There are five researchers in our group. Each researcher will select 5 random participants to assist in our experiment, making a total of 25 participants. Over 6 consecutive days we will test these 25 participants in groups of five (each researcher having five participants per day) in hopes to prove our hypothesis. Each day we will ask each participant questions regarding how they feel that day. Questions like :
"Do you feel focused today?", "Are you well rested?", "How do you feel in general?", "Did you eat before this experiment?", "Do you remember information well?", "Do you think you have a good memory?"

The setup for each day will consist of:
1. Asking the participant how he/ she feels.
2. He/ she will be given an assigned page from Dr. Seuss's, Oh, The Places We Will Go and asked to read and memorize the page.
3. The researcher will start the song for that day and the participant will have until the song is over to memorize the page.
4. Asking the participant of the previous day to recite the words he/ she memorized the day before and then also describe the picture that was on the page they memorized.

The first of the six days is the control day. It will follow the same setup as above except that there will be no music played. Instead, the participants will be timed with the stopwatch for approximately 4 minutes and asked to memorize in silence.

Each day the participants will be given a different page of the book to memorize in order to control the extent of which they can see and memorize that piece. But we stress that each day the literature is of the same book in order to maintain the same reading level and complexity. Also, each day there will be a different song played with different rhythm structure and intensity; fading from the music we believe will be the easiest to memorize in (Mozart) to the hardest music to memorize in (Squarepusher).
The music schedule consists of:
Day 1: no music (control)
Day 2: Mozart
Day 3: Miles Davis
Day 4: Heart
Day 5: REM
Day 6: Squarepusher

We will grade our participants memory level on how many words he/ she memorized with that music and also on how well he/ she described the picture.

Each day we will consider the participants gender (and general feeling of the day), their major here at Miami, the time of day they were tested and the location of which they were tested

Another part of our experiment is a survey. We will individually go around main campus and western and survey random people on how well music effects their studying ability. We will ask each person if a) they study with music on, b) what type of music they listen to while studying and why, and c) if they think listening to music helps them to study better.
We will survey 20 people each (100 people total). Then we will ask our NS class to each take the same survey and we will compare the results.

Time Line
Testing will take place between October 23-29
The survey will take place between October 15-17
We will also survey our NS class on the presentation day (TBA)
October 30- discuss our results and make our data sheet and scale

General Background Information
First Name Last Name Age Sex Major Grade Indoor/Outdoor Memory Ablility
1
2
3
4
5

Daily Data Log
Name Date Mood Music Time of Day Page Song Duration Hungry? # of Words Memorized Image Recalled
1
2
3
4
5

Bibliography

Byrnes, James P. Minds, Brains, and Learning: Understanding the Psychological and Educational Relevance of Neuroscience and Educational Relevance of Neuroscience Research. Guilford; New York: 2001.

Collier, Geoffrey L. and Gordon Logan, ÒModality differences in short-term memory for rhythms.Ó Memory and Cognitions. Psychonomic Society, Inc., 2000.

David, Kristen Olson. The Effects of Music on the Mind.
(October 3, 2001).

Hallam, Susan. The Effects of Music on Individuals: overall trends. The
Power of Music. (October
3, 2001)

Medina, Susan L., Ph.D. The Effects of Music Upon Second Language
Acquisition.
(October 3,
2001)

Sturiale, Nita. The Effects of Art Education on the Development of Cognitive
Skills. (October 3,
2001)

Thompson Forde, William, Laura-Lee Balkwill and Roxana Vernescu, ÒExpectancies generated by recent exposer to melodic sequences.Ó Memory and Cognitions. Psychonomic Society, Inc., 2000.

Woody, C. D. Memory, Learning and Higher Function: A Cellular View. Springer-Verlag, New York: 1982