By Michele Kurtz, Globe Staff, 6/15/2004

Her eyes closed, Irene Sun conjures up the decade-old memory of her baby sister falling asleep in her cradle. As Sun's hands glide gently over the piano's keys, the tranquil sounds of Chopin's lullaby, "Berceuse," flow through the Harvard residence hall, her unofficial rehearsal studio.

To Sun, 17, playing piano is much like practicing her other passion -- science. Like a musician, a scientist learns the technical while seeking answers to more meaningful questions, said the Harvard history and science major, who credits a decade of studying piano for much of her other academic success.

"The experience of being 7 and playing piano every day -- no matter what -- was incredible, because that's what I built off of in school, in science, in everything," she said.

Conventional wisdom suggests that listening to music or learning to play an instrument somehow makes children smarter. But science isn't ready to declare that a fact.

This week, the Siemens Foundation, which sponsors the prestigious Siemens Westinghouse Competition in math, science and technology, will host a recital at Carnegie Hall featuring Sun and four other past winners of the high school award. As part of the program, "Beautiful Minds, Beautiful Music," a panel of experts -- including neurologists and music professors -- also will debate whether science and musical ability are linked.

The idea for the event was derived from a revelation: More than 60 percent of the 70 regional finalists in this year's Siemens Westinghouse Competition reported that they played musical instruments.

"You start wondering, 'How does this thing connect?' " said Herb Carter, executive vice president of the Siemens Foundation.

Did learning to play an instrument give the students an advantage in math and science? Or could it simply be that intelligent and driven people often succeed at more than one thing?

"Most people who reach advanced levels in mathematics and science grow up in very rich environments," said Robert Duke, professor of music and human learning at the University of Texas. "They have lots of opportunities to experience lots of things, including music lessons."

An ongoing study at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center hopes to help answer some of these questions by studying the MRI brain scans of elementary school children who are exposed to different levels of musical training over time. Using the scans, researchers will measure the children's brain structures and see which parts of the brain become active when they're doing a musical task.

The possibility that music might boost intelligence has long fascinated the public -- especially since a study more than 10 years ago suggested that listening to a particular Mozart piano sonata temporarily improved spatial thinking, the act of creating and manipulating complex mental images, which is essential to certain aspects of math and science. Those findings, on college students, helped foster a new industry of baby-genius music videos and toys.

And schools around the country argued that by rescuing music programs from budget cuts, they could boost test scores. The Peabody School in Cambridge, for example, ramped up its music education program five years ago, and now children in kindergarten through Grade 2 have music classes four times a week. Results are not yet conclusive.

While some studies have shown a correlation between math and musical skills, even proponents of the idea caution that the link is not a very strong one. More studies are needed, they say, examining what kinds of music instruction are most beneficial and how long the gains last. Based on the evidence so far, most experts say they're not certain whether even learning to play music -- a much more rigorous exercise than passively listening -- can make people smarter or better at math.

Still, some researchers believe it's possible.

"You use some of the same brain machinery to perform mental operations in math and music, like manipulating symbols, analyzing sequences and conceptualizing distances, shapes and directions," said Dr. Mark Tramo, director of the Institute for Music and Brain Science at Massachusetts General Hospital who has worked with patients whose parietal lobes were damaged, leaving them with math, music, and sometimes language limitations.

Elementary school students at two schools in Pawtucket, R.I., who received extra music and arts training scored better on math tests than their peers at the end of seven months, according to a study published in the journal Nature in 1996 by Martin Gardiner, a senior research associate at the New England Conservatory of Music. Besides spending more time in music, students in the higher-achieving group learned to sing songs that were sequenced in difficulty.

But, in 2000, Harvard researchers cast doubt on the idea that music could lead to greater general intellect. Researchers reviewed 188 studies and found some evidence that playing and listening to music improved spatial thinking -- but little proof that music and art classes help students score higher on tests.

Most experts now agree that if a link between music and math or science exists, it is weakest when a person simply listens to music, and strongest when learning an instrument or composing music.

Playing an instrument exercises large swaths of the brain, combining visual, motor and auditory skills. "It's in the act of coordinating all of your senses and remembering it," said Tramo, an assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. "That combination is what is so powerful cognitively."

But other activities, such as playing chess, might have similar results.

"The relationships that exist that are specifically connecting music skills to mathematics and science are tenuous at best," said Duke, the music professor. "I think all of this is based on very, very fuzzy inconsistent data."

Researchers aren't certain exactly what happens in the brain when people learn to play music, though some are now trying to find out. Using MRI brain scans, Dr. Gottfried Schlaug at Beth Israel found that the corpus callosum was larger in professional musicians than in nonmusicians. That part of the brain is key to transferring information from one side of the brain to the other.

Now, Schlaug, an associate professor of neurology at Harvard and director of Beth Israel's Music and Neuroimaging Lab, is studying how music affects brain development and whether learning to play an instrument gives children an advantage in math or other subjects.

Using MRIs and math and verbal tests, researchers have begun tracking the development of more than 100 Boston-area children, ages 5 to 7, who are exposed to different amounts of music during their daily life. In one group, students are learning to play an instrument, in another they attend music class four times a week at school, and the last group's students have music instruction only once a week.

In the study, which began nearly two years ago, researchers will annually test the children's cognitive skills, and give them brain scans while they perform a musical task.

By asking for all sorts of information about each child, such as their participation in sports, researchers also hope to tease out other influences in their development.

"There could be a whole slew of factors," Schlaug said. "It may be that some or all extracurricular activities are good for intellectual development." Another possibility: One-on-one instruction often used in learning an instrument could have a lasting impact on a child's development.

Schlaug, who learned the organ while growing up in Germany and still occasionally plays weddings for fun, said he finds the mystery of music's possible relationship to other learning appealing.

"I went through really extensive music training when I was little," he said. "I think it clearly helped me, but I'm still trying to figure out what it was that helped."

This story ran on page C10 of the Boston Globe on 6/15/2004.
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