Expresión y purificación de la granzima A

All human cultures play and enjoy music. Young infants seem to have an in-nate preference for consonant over dissonant notes, and will naturally tap along with a rhythm from an early age. In fact, experiments have shown that we start deciding which music we like from before birth – babies played a certain tune while in the womb later like that tune more than a new one. Not only is music universal, but it seems to connect all of us to powerful emotions.

All of us can appreciate the products of musical genius in a way that isn’t true in other fields. Perhaps Einstein would be better understood if you could hum along to his equations.

There is an attractive but spurious idea that the intelligence behind classi-cal music might rub off on the listeners. This is classi-called the Mozart Effect. Ten minutes of Mozart’s Sonata in D major for two pianos was played to a group of school children about to take a maths test: the children performed noticeably better as compared to those sitting in silence.

But before you order that complete set of concertos for the kids, there’s an important lesson to be learned here about what scientists call controls. Yes, listening to Mozart did improve the maths scores. But with this comparison we don’t know if the effect was due to not being bored, to being relaxed by the music, to being put in a good mood or whether there is indeed some-thing special about Mozart’s music itself.

The evidence is that there is nothing magical about Mozart’s music (at least in respect of maths scores). You can get the same improvement in test scores by reading children a story. In fact, kids who enjoy music generally improve more after listening to music and, likewise, kids who prefer stories improve more after listening to stories. The results are determined by the effect of be-ing engaged, and endbe-ing up in a better mood: there is nothbe-ing intrinsically special about the classical music itself.

The effects of learning to play music, on the other hand, may be very real and very long lasting. Research has shown that children who have been giv-en music lessons have improved their scores in language-based tests and

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general IQ tests, as well as on maths-based tests and visual-spatial tests: the sort of things that are thought to be processed by the same parts of the brain engaged by music training. These effects aren’t just when compared to kids who have not been given music lessons, but in comparison to children given other kinds of after-school lessons, such as drama. One experiment showed that although extra drama lessons improved test scores, the largest improvement was in the music lesson group. Psychologists have suggested that this may be due to the wide range of brain functions engaged by play-ing music.

To play an instrument with other people you need to concentrate, but also pay attention to other people, use fine motor co-ordination, practise memo-rization or reading, and all whilst controlling your emotions. Not only is this a considerable range of activities, but music is interesting in that it is uniquely about synchronization. Some researchers have suggested that there is a par-ticular benefit to taking part in making music while young, in that it helps the developing brain learn to coordinate across disparate regions. The ben-efits of musical training have been supported by brain scans which show growth in the auditory and motor co-ordination areas of the brains of six year olds after just fifteen weeks of weekly keyboard lessons.

Neuropsychologists are taking this logic further and developing music-based therapies for stroke patients. They hope that the unique combination of functions engaged by making and enjoying music can help damaged brains rewire. One particular benefit of music is that in most people it ap-pears to be based in the opposite hemisphere of the brain to language, so musical training may help those who have suffered damage to their lan-guage-specialized brain region to retrain their undamaged side of the brain to compensate. Music training is not the quick fix of the Mozart Effect. You need to practise for hours and hours, rather than just passively listen to a CD for ten minutes. But the effects are real and accompanied by the many pleas-ures of learning a musical skill.

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Delete one letter from each pair in order to reveal a word. For example, deleting B and C from “AB CT” would give the word “AT”.

GF AI TR RS LT

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AE ND OU RT HJ EK LR

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DT OU PA HS TU GE YR

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4

In this Kakuro puzzle, fill in each white square with a digit from 1 to 9, such that each horizontal run of consecutive blank squares adds up to the total to the left of that run, and each vertical run of consecutive white squares adds up to the total directly above that run.

No number can be used more than once in any run.

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23

RESULT Subtract

fifteen 50% of

this

+11 ×3 +37

^{1/2 of}this

÷2

Study these pictures of different faces for up to two minutes, then cover them over and try to redraw them on the blank faces below as precisely as possible.

In document 85 Laura Comas Calmet (página 96-103)