Terapias de los sentidos: The Mozart effect

Los médicos que escuchan Mozart mientras realizan colonoscopias podrían detectar más tumores precancerosos, sugieren investigadores.

Una mejor detección de los pólipos adenomatosos podría salvar vidas, anotaron los autores del estudio, dado que las tasas de supervivencia al cáncer colorrectal superan el 90 por ciento si la enfermedad se detecta a tiempo.

Investigaciones anteriores han mostrado que la música de Mozart puede proveer una mejora significativa a corto plazo en el razonamiento temporal y espacial, que tiene que ver con la capacidad de una persona de comparar y transformar imágenes mentales en el espacio y en el tiempo. Los investigadores buscaban determinar si este fenómeno, llamado el "efecto Mozart", desempeñaba algún papel respecto a las tasas de detección de los pólipos precancerosos durante las colonoscopias. (Más)

Anteriormente algunos mantuvieron su influencia beneficiosa en el desarrollo mental y la concentración en niños no sin cierto escepticismo por parte de otros (no había diferencia con Bach):

Some recent research has begun to find answers. I'll discuss two such studies today, and a third next week. First, Vesna Ivanov and John Geake studied three classrooms of 5th and 6th graders. For one class, Mozart's sonata for two pianos was played both before and during the standard paper folding and cutting task used for nearly all Mozart effect research. In this task, a piece of paper is folded several times, and then holes are punched in it. Students must imagine where the holes will be when the paper is unfolded. The second class listened to Bach's Toccata in G major while completing the task, and the third class took the test in silence. Here are their results:

While they found no difference between Mozart and Bach, both classes that listened to music performed better on the test than the class that worked in silence. So apparently the Mozart effect isn't limited to Mozart. Indeed, the effect has also been found with the music of Schubert, and even the new age performer Yanni (apparently no one has yet tested '80s synth pop). Ivanov and Geake offer some interesting guesses as to why the music improves performance. They point to Rausher's argument that cognitive processing levels remain essentially the same while listening to Mozart's music. They also suspect that music may help to mask the otherwise distracting background noise that is present in nearly all "silent" classrooms. (Más)

Obviamente la "oportunidad de negocio" y el marketing alrededor de...no se dejó esperar.

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