Photo by Rick Geary

A UC Irvine researcher had students listen to Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major before taking a test.

Hey, Matt: Why is it that whenever people listen to music they have to tap their toes or somehow keep rhythm with it? — X Cleveland, San Diego

Dear Matthew Alice: My boyfriend does his math homework while he listens to Bach. He says it helps him, but he can't really explain why. Why would this be true? — Einstein’s Girlfriend, Chula Vista

In the last few years, the two hottest research areas for brain probers and human-behavior snoops are up people’s noses and in their ears. What we smell and what we hear. And they seem especially interested in music — all that Montovani and Alvin and the Chipmunks and Anthrax. The lab coat brigade has even taken some poor boobs just sitting around groovin’ on the sounds and hooked them up to machines to measure blood surges and muscle kinks and sweat drops and heart thumps, and they’ve concluded we’re all just fools for tunes. Emotionally, physically, we react. Among other things, electrical impulses in the old leg muscles go hyperactive, producing what Steve Martin, I think, termed “happy feet.” We tap our toes in response to the physical and emotional stimulation. (Yikes! Maybe Mom and Dad were right. This rock and roll stuff really is the devil’s work!) We react especially to strong rhythms. After all, we’ve been listening to them since before we were anybody — Mom’s heartbeat, f'rinstance. Walking, breathing, lots of body things are rhythmic. So basically, we just cain’t he’p it, we’re wired up that way.

One of the hottest pieces of music research came down I-5 from UC-Irvine, where a researcher in the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning conjured up what she calls the Mozart Effect. She made a whole bunch of college students (temporarily) smarter by having them listen to Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major (K. 448) before taking a test. (Rap and technopop don’t necessarily make you dumber. They have no effect.) She also found that three- and four-year-olds who took those dreaded music lessons or participated regularly in music activities were better than the music-deprived at certain types of reasoning skills, especially those related to mathematics and spatial relationships. And the kids’ skills seem to stick with them. Apparently, listening to complex forms of music (Bach would qualify) makes our brain circuits fire faster. Other lab-types suspect some types of music organize sound in a way that helps us organize our thoughts.

Spooky as it seems, neuroscientists even believe that music can act directly on our brain circuits, not just on our emotions. There are some very rare cases of “musicogenic epilepsy” that don’t seem to be related to emotional states or physical tension or arousal. A certain sound just zaps down a particular brain circuit and causes a seizure. So the next time you crank up the thrash, better have your lead hat on.