Elephants on Acid (7 page)

Perhaps the optical illusion Simons and Chabris revealed is merely an artifact of a lab setting. Surely in real life we would notice the gorilla. However, in the mid-1990s Simons and a different colleague, Daniel Levin, conducted an experiment that suggests not.

One of the researchers posed as a tourist seeking directions and approached random pedestrians on the campus of Cornell University. “Excuse me, do you know where Olin Library is?” he asked as he fumbled with a map. The researcher and the pedestrian conversed briefly, until workmen carrying a door suddenly barged between them. A moment later they resumed their conversation.

However, something had changed when the door passed between them. One of the workmen carrying the door was actually the second researcher, who surreptitiously switched places with his colleague and continued to converse with the pedestrian as though he had been there the entire time.

The two researchers were approximately the same age, but were dressed in different clothes. Amazingly, over half the subjects, eight out of fifteen, didn’t realize they were talking to a new person until the researcher stopped them and asked, “Did you notice anything unusual at all when that door passed by a minute ago?” Many people replied, “Yes, those workmen were very rude.” To which the researcher would reply, “Did you notice that I’m not the same person who approached you to ask for directions?” A bewildered look followed.

Like the invisible-gorilla test, the changing-tourist experiment reveals that we often fail to notice unexpected changes to an attended object. This phenomenon is known as “change blindness.” Becoming aware of it can be rather unnerving. How much of the world around us might we be missing, one has to wonder. And can we ever again trust people who stop us and ask for directions on university campuses?

Of course, experiencing these effects for yourself is far more powerful than reading about them. If you go to Professor Simons’s Web site, http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/media/Boese.html, you can view videos of his research, including the
¹⁶
experiments discussed above. However, you’ll want to keep a close eye on the site. It has the potential to change at any time.

A young man stares at a movie screen. Restraints hold him in his chair. Small clamps keep his eyes pried open. He cannot blink. He must continue to watch as scene after scene of graphic violence plays on the screen.

Fans of Stanley Kubrick will recognize this scene from his movie A
Clockwork Orange
. The main character, Alex DeLarge, is subjected to a treatment called Ludovico aversion therapy, designed to transform him from an unruly thug into a nonviolent, productive member of society. The treatment causes him to be crippled by nausea if he so much as thinks about violence, but it leads to tragic consequences. When released, Alex discovers he is powerless to defend himself against his numerous enemies, who duly take revenge on him.

Twenty-one years after the release of Kubrick’s film, a strangely similar scene played out in a University of California laboratory—with one major difference. In Alex’s place was an adult cat.

Researchers led by Dr. Yang Dan, an assistant professor of neurobiology, anesthetized a cat with Sodium Pentothal, chemically paralyzed it with Norcuron, and secured it tightly in a surgical frame. They then glued metal posts to the whites of its eyes, forcing it to look at a screen. Scene after
¹⁷
scene played on the screen, but instead of images of graphic violence, the cat had to watch something almost as terrifying—swaying trees and turtleneck-wearing men.

This was not a form of
Clockwork Orange
–style aversion therapy for cats. Instead, it was a remarkable attempt to tap into another creature’s brain and see directly through its eyes. The researchers had inserted fiber electrodes into the vision-processing center of the cat’s brain, a small group of cells called the lateral geniculate nucleus. The electrodes measured the electrical activity of the cells and transmitted this information to a nearby computer. Software then decoded the information and transformed it into a visual image.

The cat watched eight different short movies, and from the cat’s brain the researchers extracted images that were very blurry, but were recognizably scenes from the movies. There were the trees, and there was that guy in the turtleneck. The researchers suggested that the picture quality could be improved in future experiments by measuring the activity of a larger number of brain cells.

The researchers had a purely scientific motive for the experiment. They hoped to gain insight into “the functions of neuronal circuits in sensory processing.” But the commercial potential of the technology is mind-boggling. Imagine being able to see exactly what your cat is up to on its midnight prowls. Forget helmet cam at the Super Bowl; get ready for eye cam. Or how about this—never carry a camera again. Take pictures by blinking your eyes. It would work great unless you had a few too many drinks on vacation!

Mozart has a new hangout. No longer relegated to the dusty stereos of classical-music buffs, he can now be heard drowning out the sounds of crying babies and squealing Teletubbies at the local nursery, or blasting from high-end toys and crib mobiles.

Why has Mozart become so popular with the under-five set? The reason traces back to the startling results of a 1993 experiment performed by Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw, and Katherine Ky at the University of California, Irvine.

In the experiment, thirty-six college students each tried to solve three sets of spatial-reasoning tasks. A typical task consisted of imagining a piece of paper folded and cut in various ways, and then figuring out what the paper would look like unfolded. Before starting each new task, the subjects sat through a different ten-minute “listening condition.” Before the first task they heard Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major, K. 448; before the second one, a blood-pressure-lowering relaxation tape; and prior to the third, silence.

The final results showed a clear trend. The students scored highest on the task after listening to Mozart. In fact, the improvement was quite dramatic: “The IQs of subjects participating in the music condition were 8–9 points above their IQ scores in the other two conditions.”

Consider the implications of this. An almost ten-point leap in IQ—albeit a temporary one, as the effect seemed to fade away after fifteen minutes—just by listening to Mozart. Getting smart fast had never been so easy.

These results got people’s attention. Soon the “Mozart Effect,” as it came to be known, was being tested in all kinds of situations.

High school students started playing Mozart while studying for exams. University of Texas scientists combined Mozart’s music with whole-body vibrotactile stimulation to see if this would enhance the effect—it didn’t. A Texas prison made inmates listen to the composer during classes. Rauscher, in a follow-up experiment, claimed Mozart’s music improved maze learning in rats. Korean gardeners declared they had a season of spectacular blossoms after playing Mozart in a field of roses. Finnish researchers looked into whether the effect improved the memory skills of monkeys. To their surprise, Mozart actually had a negative effect. Our primate cousins evidently aren’t classical-music lovers.

Scientists also considered the work of other composers. The original researchers theorized that the complexity of Mozart’s music somehow stimulated neurons in the cortex of the brain. They explained that “we chose Mozart since he was composing at the age of four. Thus we expect that Mozart was exploiting the inherent repertoire of spatial-temporal firing patterns in the cortex.” The work of other “complex” musicians—such as Schubert, Mendelssohn, and, of all people, Yanni—was found to share Mozart’s enhancing properties. Noncomplex, unenhancing musicians included Philip Glass, Pearl Jam, and Alice in Chains.

But popular interest in the phenomenon didn’t really explode until word got out that a little bit of Mozart could increase infant intelligence. Ambitious parents, eager to have a junior genius, promptly went Mozart mad. Mozart-for-baby CDs rocketed to the top of the charts. The sounds of the composer began to be piped into nurseries. Zell Miller, governor of Georgia, ordered that Mozart CDs be distributed to all infants born in the state, and the state of Florida passed a law requiring classical music be played in state-funded day-care centers.

The curious thing was that not a single experiment had ever suggested a link between listening to Mozart’s music and increased infant intelligence. The closest an experiment had come to making this connection was a 1997 study, again by Rauscher, that demonstrated a relationship between piano lessons and improved spatial-reasoning skills among preschoolers. Learning to play the piano, of course, is not the same as listening to a CD.

The massive amount of popular interest in the Mozart Effect prompted the scientific community to take a closer look at the phenomenon. That’s when the theory began to hit rocky ground. Many researchers reported a failure to replicate the results of the 1993 study. In response, the UC Irvine team clarified that Mozart’s music did not appear to have an effect on all forms of IQ, but rather on spatial-temporal IQ, the kind that applied to paper folding and cutting tasks. In other words, millions of parents were unwittingly priming their children to become master scrapbookers. But even with this narrower focus, other labs continued to report a failure to replicate the results.

In 1999 and 2000 two researchers, Christopher Chabris (whom we just met in the invisible-gorilla experiment) and Lois Hetland, separately analyzed all the experimental data on the Mozart Effect. Both concluded that while a temporary effect did appear to exist, it was negligible. As for its application to children, Hetland bluntly dismissed this:

¹⁸
The existence of a short-lived effect by which music enhances spatial-temporal performance in adults does not lead to the conclusion that exposing children to classical music will raise their intelligence or their academic achievement or even their long-term spatial skills.

These negative results threw some cold water on the Mozart Effect’s scientific credibility, but they hardly dimmed its mass-market popularity. A sprawling self-help industry continues to promote the benefits of Mozart via books, CDs, Web sites, and countless baby toys. One entrepreneur, who has trademarked the term
Mozart Effect
, even claims the composer’s music has medical benefits. He tells how he dissolved a large blood clot behind his eye by humming it away. That sound you hear now is Mozart turning over in his grave.

With a drink gripped precariously in one hand, you lean closer toward your fellow guest. “What did you say?”—“I really don’t know what she sees in him.”—“Beg your pardon?”—You lean closer still. More people are arriving fast. The background murmur of voices is rising to a din. It’s growing harder by the minute to hear anyone at this cocktail party. “I said, I REALLY DON’T KNOW WHY SHE GOES OUT WITH HIM.”

In January 1959 William MacLean theorized in the
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
that as any cocktail party grows in size there will arrive a moment when the gathering abruptly ceases to be quiet and becomes loud. This is the moment when guests start to crowd together and raise their voices to be heard above the background noise. He produced a mathematical formula to predict exactly when this would occur:

In this formula
N
is the number of guests at the party, K the number of guests per conversational group,
a
the sound absorption coefficient of the room,
V
the room volume,
h
the “properly weighted mean free path . . . of a ray of sound through the room,”
d
_o
the minimum conventional distance between talkers, and
S
_m
the minimum signal-to-noise ratio required for intelligible conversation. To calculate the maximum number of guests compatible with a quiet party, solve for
N
_o
. Quite simple, really.

Acoustical researchers were not about to let MacLean’s hypothesis go untested. Throughout the remainder of 1959 the staff of the Division of Building Research of the National Research Council of Canada fanned out at cocktail parties, acoustical equipment in hand, to gather experimental evidence that would either confirm or refute MacLean’s theory.

The investigators admitted a few of the gatherings they monitored may have seemed like regrettable choices, in light of the nature of the research. For instance, collecting data at a cocktail party attended entirely by librarians, “a group dedicated professionally to maintaining quiet,” would seem to defeat the purpose. However, they insisted the librarians were actually quite raucous.