This I Believe

Educators: Take Note!

I have been teaching biology at the university level for 25 years. As a result, I deeply appreciate the need for science literacy in our public schools and I am often called upon for support when the school district in which my children are educated is facing yet another levy or bond issue. I am happy to provide that support. Yet, the message that I send is not that we should devote more time and money to instruction in science and math. Instead, it is my heartfelt belief and my professional judgment that public school students would be much better served by investing in the arts. And this conviction is a direct result of studying biology.

We’ve all heard of the “Mozart Effect”–the idea that a baby’s intellectual development can be influenced in utero by broadcasting the dulcet strains of Mozart into a pregnant woman’s uterus. Belief in this idea has resulted in a cottage industry of reproducing the works of classical composers in brightly colored packages designed to attract the attention of overachieving parents. Unfortunately, the research upon which the “Mozart Effect” was based was performed on adult college students whose cognition and IQ improved temporarily after listening to Mozart. The extension to embryonic humans was an unsupported extrapolation. Nonetheless, there is very good evidence from our biology that music is not an ornament or “auditory cheesecake” as some have called it, but a biological imperative and a fundamental part of being human. It is on this premise that I stake my claim for music education in public schools.

If musical capacity and appreciation is rooted in our genes, this leads to a series of testable predictions. For instance, if music is a product of evolution, we ought to be able to find vestiges of music-making in other species. And we do. Take humpback whales for instance. They mix percussive elements (beat) with pure tones (melody) in the impressive songs of the males. In their songs, they state themes, elaborate them, invert them and restate the original. Whales sing in defined keys. Birds are even more ingenious and often make structural and aesthetic choices common to human composers. Birds show simple harmonic relations, transposition to different keys and simple melodic canons. And, of course, there are the Thai elephants that use human instruments to make music. They’ve recently released a CD on which appears a piece that is destined to be a classic–Rhapsody in Grey!

If music is part of our genetic heritage, we ought to be able to find evidence of music-making in early humans. No problem. When not busy chasing small mammals with sticks, early hominids were devoted musicians who created flutes out of hollow bones as well as drums and rattles. Even the newly discovered form of primitive man–the Lilliputian hominids recently found in Indonesia–were dedicated musicians.

If our aptitude for music is innate, it should visible in infants. There is good experimental evidence that babies understand and respond to music WITHOUT LEARNING which suggests that music literacy is inborn. Some scientists now believe that musical ability may have preceded language acquisition which may explain why listening to and playing music can facilitate the learning of language. In fact, music is known to improve a variety of skills from spatial reasoning to memorization. Thus, if our goal is to increase math scores in public schools, we should teach music.

This conclusion is inescapable if we consider how music is perceived and processed by the brain. Unlike language, there is no “music center” in the brain. Indeed, different aspects of music such as tone, melody, rhythm and beat are processed separately in different areas of the brain. Although much of this processing occurs on the right side of the brain, some aspects of music perception occur on the left half. Thus, to fully understand music, it requires orchestration of complex activities in both hemispheres. The integration in processing the diverse aspects of even a simple tune may explain music’s ability to positively influence other cognitive abilities. It is for this reason that, when I do the obligatory but universally-loathed walk through the plant and animal kingdoms in my Biology 101 class, we do it with a live string quartet playing on stage.

The power of music to promote learning is important, but even more critical is the emotional richness music provides. I believe that if we can teach a child that he has the power in his own hands to create something of immense beauty, that knowledge is a foil for the ugliness and depravity of the world; it enriches an ennobles a life; it is a gift beyond measure. I believe that if all children could learn this, there would be no more Columbines or Bimidjis. I believe that there is hope for all children if their education can connect them to the beauty and passion of being human.