Your choice of music can also affect your ability to accomplish tasks
or to learn. Two researchers explored this relationship by studying
the effects of music and rhythm on the nervous system of mice. For
eight weeks, one group of mice constantly listened to Strauss waltzes
(highly organized and orderly music), while a second heard
disharmonious sounds in the form of continuous drumbeats. A third
group was raised in silence.
After eight weeks, the mice were placed in a maze to find food. The
mice in the second group wandered off with no sense of direction—
“a clear indication they were having trouble learning”—and took
much longer to find the food than they had at the beginning of the
study. The mice exposed “to discordant sounds not only developed
difficulties in learning and memory, ... but they also incurred
structural changes in their brain cells.” The researchers’ diagnosis is
very interesting: “We believe that the mice were trying to
compensate for this constant bombardment of disharmonic noise. ...
They were struggling against the chaos.”