Uniting mind and music: Shaw's vision continues.(Forum Focus: Arts Awareness and Advocacy)

Gordon Shaw, best known to the public as a leader in the discovery of the "Mozart Effect" died in April [see obituary on page 20]. But his legacy uniting music and brain function will live on.

Shaw led a number of landmark studies that established the connection between active participation in music and the development of the brain, with demonstrated implications for spatial-temporal reasoning and math ability.

"Dr. Shaw's groundbreaking studies on active music making and higher cognitive functioning really led the way for other music researchers," said Mary Luehrsen, director of the International Foundation for Music Research.

According to the Associated Press, in 1973 he became interested in brain theory and began research on the brain's capacity for spatial reasoning and its use in such activities as solving mathematical problems and playing chess. With graduate student Xiaodan Leng, he devised a computer model of the brain. They used musical notes to represent areas of brain activity, and were surprised to find that the overall sound resembled classical music.

Shaw decided to test the results of classical music on the brain, initially studying three-year-olds and then college students. He gained national attention in 1993 when he reported that a group of college students who listened to Mozart's "Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major" saw their IQs increase as much as nine points. Hearing such music, Shaw speculated, might provide a "warmup exercise" for parts of the brain that perform high levels of abstract thinking.

And a later study, conducted in conjunction with psychologist Frances Rauscher of the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, showed that preschoolers who were given piano lessons once a week scored 34 percent higher on tests designed to measure spatial-temporal reasoning skills--those required for mathematics, chess, science and engineering--than classmates who received no music lessons.

Music and arts advocates ...