media – Gene's Medical Notes

Is there any truth about the benefits of Classical music?

Is there any truth to the commonly accepted notion that listening to classical music improves mental capacity? Somehow it has been accepted in modern society that classical musicians have larger frontal cortices, better mental reasoning powers and perhaps intelligence quotients. Over the last two decades or so this idea has fuelled a rise in the number of pregnant mothers listening to classical music – whether or not they like it – and parents enrolling their children into music classes. The music of Mozart, in particular, has enjoyed a resurgence as its classical form is deemed to be more logical and organised, compared to music of other periods, assisting in triggering patterns of organisation in the brain amongst its listeners.

How did this idea about Classical music come about? In the 1990s scientists conducted a series of experiments where one group of students were played one of Mozart’s piano sonatas before a spatial reasoning test, while another group sat in silence. The group that was played the music beforehand performed better on that task than the control group. The effect on the control group was temporary and only lasted fifteen minutes, meaning that after the fifteen minute mark the disparities between the results were minimal and statistically the same. The results of the group found also that while music primed the individual particularly for mathematical tasks, after an hour of listening to Classical music, the effect on the brain was lost.

That piece of research was pounced on by the media and other individuals and seemingly perpetuated to promote the listening of Classical music. One governor of the state of Georgia even decreed that newborn babies be given a copy of a CD of Mozart’s works upon leaving the hospital. The Mozart Effect, to give it its common name, was written about in newspapers and magazines, and this began the spur of Mozart-related sales of music as well as the trend of mothers playing such music to their children in and out of the womb.

The most important question we need to ask is whether there is any truth in such research, and whether it can be corroborated.

We know that some forms of music has a soothing, calming effect on individuals. Playing the music to the students may have calmed that so they were not nervous, allowing them to perform better on the task. However, relaxation need not take them the form of Classical music. Any activity that promotes calm before a task – reading a light magazine, playing computer games, talking with a friend – can also hence be said to have the same effect as the classical music that was played.

What if the students in the group had read a joke book or comic beforehand, been less worried about the test and scored better? It might have prompted a deluge of articles claiming “Reading Archie (or The Beano – insert your own title here) improves your IQ”.

Or if the students had been offered a protein drink beforehand, it would not be inconceivable that someone would latch to that piece of research and declare that “Protein Drinks not just good for your body, but for your brain too”.

Mozart’s music has been said to embody the elements of classical music as we know it. Organised formal structures, chords and harmonies through related keys, use of contrasting tunes, contrasts in volume all feature in his music. But the music of other composers have such features too. Imagine if the composer Josef Haydn had been the lucky beneficiary of the experiment and his music had been played instead. The sales of his music catalogue would have hit the roof!

Subsequent scientists all found that listening to music of any form caused improvements, and the genre of music – whether rock or Classical – was irrelevant. But studies today still quote Mozart.

Is it ethical that the media promotes unsubstantiated research by reporting without closer scrutiny? As we have seen in previous blogs posts, the media reports on things without necessarily scrutinising the evidence, and entrusts so-called experts to corroborate the evidence, while it fills column inches and air time with modal auxiliary verbs? Huh? In simple terms, it means that if there is a sniff of a link between A and B, the media reports that “A could cause B”. Never mind whether it does or not, there is always the disclaimer of the word “could”.

In this instance, students performed better on a spatial reasoning task after listening to Mozart; hence the headline “Mozart could improve mental powers”. Diluted over several recounts, you could get “According to XXX newspaper, Mozart improves brain power” before arriving at “Mozart improves brain power”. Unfortunately, this is when the headline is then pounced on by anyone who would stand to profit from espousing this theme.

Who would profit from this? The Classical music world – performers, writers, musicians – can use this “research” to entice people into taking up lessons and buying CDs and magazines. If you read any music teacher’s website you may find them espousing the benefits of learning music; it is rare if you find one that advises it is a lot of effort.

The media will profit from such “research” because it means there is an untapped well of news to report and bleed dry in the quest for filling column inches and air time. News exclusives will be brought out, and so-called experts will also profit for appearing on the news and programmes, either monetarily or in the form of public exposure.

One must question the ethics of incorrect reporting. Unfortunately unsubstantiated research leads to more diluted misreporting, which can then form the basis of new research – research that uses these claims as the groundwork for investigation.

It is scary to think that all the medical research that has been done into effect of music and health could be biased because of the so-called effect of classical music. Could musical activities such as learning the piano help reduce Parkinson’s disease? Could listening to the music of Beethoven reduce the incidence of higher cases of Alzheimer’s disease? Could it all be wrong – have we all been sent down the wrong tunnel by an avalance of hype reporting?

It may be fair to say the human impulse is to buy first and consider later, because we are prone to regret. If we have missed an opportunity to improve the lives and abilities of our children, then we will be kicking ourselves silly forever with guilt.

So if you are still not convinced either way about whether classical music – either in the listening or the practice – really does have any effect, you could at least mitigate your guilt by exposing your child to piano music, for example that has predictable patterns in the left hand. Sometimes, listening to structurally-organised music such as from the Baroque may be useful, but it is also good to listen to Romantic music because the greater range of expression arguably develops a child that has more emotionally subtlety and intelligence.

You may find that ultimately, any truth in the research about Classical music and its mental benefits is not due to the blind passive listening, sitting there while the music goes on around your children. It is in the child’s inner drive to mentally organise the sounds that are heard, the trying and attempts to organise background sounds that really triggers the mental activity in the brain. It is more the practised ability in the inner mind to organise musical sounds that causes better performance in related mental tasks.

Physical and Mental Contamination

Is there a need to start worrying about your kitchen? I don’t mean in the home improvement context, never mind that the island unit is looking a bit worse for wear, and that your swanky appliances need upgrading so you can have two ovens to cook for your little army; or maybe you are thinking you could expand beyond the microwave and gas cooker. Or perhaps you are considering the option of creating an open plan kitchen. Whatever the physical changes you are considering, they are beyond the scope of discussion. Danger lurks in your kitchen.

It doesn’t come in the form of masked strangers brandishing kitchen implements. Or ruthless critics in the form of master chefs or children. No, the hidden danger in your kitchen is more subtle, more soft, yet potentially more lethal.

The kitchen sponge.

Scientists estimate that the kitchen sponge contains the highest concentration of bacteria than anywhere in the house. On the face of things, this is not an unrealistic statement. The kitchen sponge is in contact with remnants of food as it passes over the crockery and cutlery, and while the latter are clean, microscopic elements of food have merely been transferred to the sponge. And even if you take the effort to rinse out the sponge, or go a step further by microwaving the sponge, trace elements of food bacteria will remain.

According to the Mail Online, one of the more sensationalist newspapers in the United Kingdom, there are 54 billion cells of bacteria residing on the humble sponge. But of course the Mail Online would say that – it is taking a simple fact and blowing it out of proportion in order to create a purchasing headline. (And what is a purchasing headline? It is one that intrigues you enough to make a financial physical purchase to discover more, or hook you in enough to commit your time to reading more, never mind that the headline was slightly manipulated in the first place.) The fact is, bacteria exist all around us. They are on the surfaces of things around us. But it is important to distinguish between good and bad bacteria. The majority of bacteria around us are harmless. The remaining bacteria can do us harm if they enter our bodies, which is why it is a good idea to wash hands before eating. This ensures the harmful bacteria on our hands, either from touching door knobs or taps or other contaminated surfaces, does not rest on food that we ingest. It is also a good idea to cover up exposed cuts so that bacteria does not enter the bloodstream.

Bacteria is all around us but we can’t live life in fear of it.

Can you imagine if the word bacteria was substituted with the word humans? It would give a better perspective.

The headline would read that something like “A higher concentration of criminals found in [name of city]”. But you can’t live like every human in that city will do you harm. You can only take necessary steps to avoid being negatively affected.

Just like bacteria.

The current guidelines around hand washing recommend that we our hands with water and soap for at least 20 seconds, after instances such as using the toilet, handling raw food like meat and vegetables. It is advised that we wash our hands before eating or after contact with animals.

Does washing with specialist soaps make any difference? A study by Rutgers University and GOJO Industries in the US found that there was little difference, which suggests the science between Brand X and Brand Y is as manufactured as the products themselves.

The study involved twenty volunteers and examined variables of hand washing such as brand, volume and time elapsed. A non-harmful strain of the bacteria e-coli was placed on the hands of the volunteers and then examined after washing to see how much remained.

The study found that there was little to distinguish between normal soaps and anti-microbial formulations. In fact, as long as volunteers washed their hands with soap for thirty seconds, the difference in results after washing were negligible.

There were a couple of minor limitations to the study conducted by Rutgers and GOJO Industries.

Firstly, that sample size is too small. Secondly, volunteers could not ethically be asked to handle deadly bacteria so the results may have only be applicable to that particular strain of bacteria.

There was a major stumbling block to the research however. GOJO Industries manufactures hand soaps.

We have already examined in the past how it is not a good idea if pharmaceutical companies run their own tests because the authenticity cannot be guaranteed completely if there is a bias from the outset. If a pharmaceutical company or any other manufacturing company is going to invest time, money and effort into production, it is going to choose results which have a positive bias, rather than those with a negative one which either force further research, impacting on production time and costs, or one that cause the complete abandonment of results.

Is there anything we can trust anymore? The dilemmas we have are that the media distorts reporting, and research is funded with an agenda which produces an expected outcome. It is difficult to secure funding for research if there is no meaningful purpose behind it beyond sales.

Returning to the original issue of bacteria, as long as we take necessary precautions, that is the best we can do. These precautions include replacing the sponge regularly, and not leaving unwashed dishes in the kitchen, and washing our hands to avoid contamination.

And take in what you read and hear about health and news with a pinch of objectivity. Avoid contaminating your mind too!

A smart person thought up the mental improvement products

The trail of human evolution is littered with gadgetry that have outlived their usefulness. We can add devices such as the fax machine, walkman, mini-disc and tape recorder to the list of machines which seemed clever at the time but have now before obsolete. Those of us of a certain age will remember newer additions such as the PocketPC, a palm sized screen which was used with a stylus that tapped out letters on screen, and the HP Jornada, a slightly bigger tablet sized keyboard and phone. And who could forget the Nintendo Brain Training programmes for the DS and Fitness Programmes for the Wii?

Launched in 2005, Nintendo’s Brain Training programmes claimed to increase mental functioning. Nintendo’s premise was that the concentration required in solving a variety of puzzles, involving language, mathematical and reasoning, increased blood flow to the frontal cortex of the brain, which at least maintained brain functioning or helped improve it. After all, since the brain is a muscle, exercising it by bombarding it with mental exercises would keep it active and healthy, right?

It is the idea of keeping the brain active that leads many to attempt their daily crossword or Sudoku. The latter in particular has seen an surge in interest over the past decade and is now a feature in newspaper back pages and magazines. There are even publications exclusively filled with Sudoku puzzles, and even more complex versions where each traditional puzzle forms a square in a bigger and complex three by three grid. If you thought doing a Sudoku puzzle was hard, imagine having to work on it in relation to eight others. It would be absolutely mind-boggling!

Is there any truth about the positive enhancements to the human life that these objects or activities bring? Nintendo’s claims about the Brain Training programmes were doubted by leading neuroscientists, who doubted the tenuous links between the increased blood flow to the brain and the vaguely described positive effects to life. It is akin to making a blanket statement saying chess grand masters or academics are the happiest people around. Unfortunately it is yet another case of a company creating a product and then engineering the science around it.

Manufacturers of beauty products do it all the time. Whether it is skin care or facial products being flogged, you will find an aspirational theme within the first five seconds of the advertisement (“Look beautiful! Stay young!”) which is then followed by a pseudo-scientific claim, preferably involving percentages (sounds more authoritative) and a small sample size (easier to corroborate, or disclaim, depending on the need).

“Live young forever. XX skin lotion is carefully formulated to retain your natural moisture, so you look and feel twenty years younger. 86% of 173 women noticed a change in skin density after using it for three months.”

There you have it. The secret of beauty product advertising.

Unfortunately, if there was any display of mental acuity, it was by the marketing team of Nintendo. In pitching a product to adults, using the retention and improvement of mental agility as a plus point, they not only convinced adults to buy what was essentially a toy, but to buy one for their children as well. The DS alone has since sold over 90 million units worldwide, and when you take into account the cost of games and all that, you will have to concede that someone at Nintendo had the smarts to produce a tidy little earner.

(For those who were more concerned with retaining their physical functioning, the Nintendo Wii Fit programmes performed that function and filled in the gap in that market.)

The improvement of mental functioning is always a good basis for marketing any product. You can find a whole plethora of products huddling behind it. Multi vitamins, activity puzzles, recreational activities involving multi-tasking – all supposedly give the brain a workout, but more importantly, tap into the fears of missing out or the loss of mental function in the human psyche, that makes people buy not out of potential gain, but fear of lost opportunity and potential regret.

The loss of mental function can lead to Alzheimer’s disease, for which there is currently no cure. With 30 million people worldwide suffering from it, this presents an endless river of opportunity for people researching the disease, as well as people developing products to improve mental function in the hope that it can stave off the disease. Like the Nintendo Brain Training developers realised, it is not so much about whether these scientific products work that makes people buy them – the evidence that is produced is biased and not independent – but it is the fear of missing out and retrospective guilt that compels people to make the purchase. Buy first, examine the evidence later, is the apparent dogma.

Unfortunately we are at the stage of modern society where it is not just the product that needs scrutiny, but whether the scrutiny itself needs scrutiny for evidence of bias, either in the form of financial ties or expected research outcomes.

Mental improvement is an area that product developers – whether the products be vitamins, books or applications – will continually target because human beings will always seek to improve mental prowess, both in themselves and their children, in the hope that somewhere down the line it offers an advantage, or prevents the mental degeneration associated with the aging process. And the compelling reason to buy lies somewhere in the meeting points of being seduced by the aspirational ideals the product offers, the fear of missing out, and the assumption that the underlying evidence is empirical. The greatest mental sharpness has been displayed by the one who has understood the sales psychology of mental health improvement products and used it to his or her advantage.

Red wine – the media’s Wonderdrink

If there is anything to be said about the British media, it is that it seems intent to make a superhero or villain out of the common everyday foods we encounter. Every now and again we are presented with small-scale research on food or drink that promises either a miracle cure or a dangerous red flag. One assumption peddled to us is by continuing to consume the food, we will either gain added health benefit without too much effort. Miracle cure just by eating! The counter to this is the article written to warn against continued consumption. Danger food – consume carefully! You are either a superhero, or a villain in the world of miracle foods.

It is safe to assume that the purpose of these articles is ultimately to hook the reader into buying the newspaper to examine the article further. And if it appears on an online version instead, you can be sure that the intention is to keep the reader glued to the page while paid-for advertising revenue flashes on the side panels. To state it cynically, the purpose of these articles is for sales. It might be long before certain foods such as milk might purportedly be the cure to cancer.

We need not spend too much time judging how effective these media reports are. If you are looking to a newspaper as a reference for health advice, you might as well ask about ballet lessons from the petrol station.

One of the poster children for miracle foods is red wine. Depending on what you’ve read, red wine can:

Boost immunity
Prevent tooth decay
Save your eyesight
Be good for the heart

But it won’t help you in the fight against diabetes, or help you lose weight. Was worth considering, though.

One of the latest research into red wine studied if, yes, it could find the ageing process. A US study suggested resveratrol, a substance found in the skin of red grapes, may help keep our muscles and nerves healthy as we get older.

Researchers gave mice food containing resveratrol for a year, then compared the muscle and nerve cells of those mice to cells from mice the same age who’d had a normal diet. In the mice who’d had the resveratrol-enriched diet, they found less evidence of age-related changes.

The researchers also looked at another chemical, metformin, but found it had less effect.

Researchers divided laboratory-bred mice into four groups and fed them either:

a normal diet
a lower calorie diet from four months of age
a diet enriched with resveratrol from one year of age
a diet enriched with metformin from one year of age

When the mice were aged two years, they looked at their muscle and nerves, at the meeting point of the two (the neuromuscular junction, or NMJ) in a leg muscle. They also looked at the NMJs of three-month-old mice to see how they compared to the older mice.

Compared with mice fed a regular diet, those who’d been given resveratrol or who’d had a calorie-restricted diet showed:

less fragmentation of tissue at the neuromuscular junction
fewer areas where the nerve cells had degenerated, which would have meant that the muscle no longer had input from nerves

The two-year-old mice which had calorie-restricted diets had neuromuscular junctions that were most similar to the three-month-old mice. Metformin had little effect in this experiment.

The researchers say that this indicates less ageing as muscle fibres increase in size with ageing. But this does not suggest if the ageing was beneficial or not to the subject.

Resveratrol has been of interest to anti-ageing scientists for many years and researchers have previously shown it may be linked to a slowing of the decline in thinking and movement, at least in rodents. This study suggests a possible way this might happen.

But the results don’t tell us anything about what happens in humans. They suggest this substance may be useful for further research in humans at some point. They certainly don’t provide a reason to drink gallons of red wine, in the hope of seeing an anti-ageing effect. Drinking too much alcohol is a sure-fire way to speed up deterioration of thinking skills, and can cause brain damage. Too much alcohol in the long term is linked to several cancers, heart disease, stroke and liver disease.

Although red wine contains resveratrol, the amount varies widely, from around 0.2mg to 12.6mg per litre. That’s nothing like enough to get the amounts consumed in this study.

The mice were fed 400mg of resveratrol per kilogram of body weight each day. To achieve the same level of anti-ageing purported in the study, the average weight woman in the UK (around 70kg) would need 28g of resveratrol a day for the same effect. This would be obtained by consuming more than 2,000 litres of the most resveratrol-rich wine. An average weight man would need even more. This would be going beyond side effects and into the realm of health dangers! Or if you were disturbed by the daily consumption of this amount of alcohol, and still wanted to try, you could eat bin loads of berries – you might need fifty of these a day. What’s for breakfast? Blueberries. Snack? Blueberries powerbar. Lunch? Blueberry soup? Dessert? Blueberry cake. Resveratrol occurs naturally in the skins of some red fruits, including some grapes, blueberries and mulberries. But this rate, anti-ageing might be more of a curse.

The study was carried out by researchers from Virginia Tech, Roanoke College and the National Institute on Aging, all in the US, and was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Is there any thing of value we can glean from this research? One certainly hopes that the whole research was conducted for more significance than mere paper filler.

The effects of rosveratol will probably hold the most interest for researchers. One can imagine that scientists will be looking to produce genetically-modified grapes that hold more of the chemical, or refine the chemical until it reaches higher levels of purity. Drugs, medication, and anti-ageing creams may contain higher levels of rosveratol. Why is there the interest in slowing down ageing? It extends beyond the obvious physical aging. Slowing down the process may also inhibit age-related diseases such as cancer, diabetes, Parkinson’s and dementia.

And while it was of little effect in this particular trial, metformin is currently undergoing trials as an anti-ageing drug. While it is one of the drugs used in the treatment of type 2 diabetes, and marketed under brand names such as Glucophage, it is relatively new as an anti-ageing drug.

Belgian researchers researching metformin found it increased the number of oxygen molecules released into a cell. When tested on roundworms, the worms aged slower, did not slow down, nor develop wrinkles. They grew stronger bones and increased their own lifespan by nearly 40%.

Metformin only costs only 10p a day which means it falls well under the threshold of QALY (quality-assisted life years) cost that the NHS uses to measure cost-effectiveness. It is conceivable that either metformin or rosveratol could form the active ingredient of anti-ageing pills or creams in the future.

And when that happens, you can read all about it in the papers again, about how red wine really lengthens your lifespan! You might even want to sign up for a clinical trial!

The British media is really drunk on red wine.

And did you know, that if it wasn’t for red wine, the world of Classical music might not have reached the dizzy heights that it did? While the link is slightly tenuous, it can be said that if it weren’t for red wine, Classical music might not have attained its popularity. Read about it here and decide for yourself.