Mozart: Baby Brain Booster?

We have all thought about how we are going to raise our future children. Yes, even you, Yeshiva boy. We have thought about which Jewish schools we will send them to, the different types of sports and instruments that we will "encourage" them to pick up and eventually master, and the brands of designer clothing that we will spoil them with, despite the fact that they will inevitably outgrow them within weeks. Most important, however, are our concerns that we end up raising future Jewish doctors, lawyers, and if we are really lucky, presidents.

Admittedly tempting are products such as "Baby Einstein," "Brainy Baby," and the like, videos that allow us to sit back while ensuring us that prodigies are on their way by stimulating our babies' brains with lessons on life's everyday wonders and occurrences, incorporated with vivid shapes, colors, and classical music. According to Dr. Dimitri Christakis of the University of Washington, these videos claim to "make your children smarter or more musical or more mathematical." Sounds incredible! But we ought to be wary of such extravagant claims; have we not always heard that watching television only sets back development?

The question of whether or not "Baby Einstein" falls into a unique category of "good television," raises an even larger question: Is it even true that television is bad?

There is the minority opinion of the Canadian Pediatric Society that television actually is good for children. The Society hypothesizes that television promotes the development of children's reading skills through the practice resulting from the reading of texts and subtitles displayed in television programs. Nevertheless, common wisdom seems to rule this case. The American Academy of Pediatrics weighs in with a "better-safe-than-sorry" stance on television for young children, advising parents that it is more likely that television is harmful than helpful, and many studies have indicated various types of brain damage caused by television viewing.

An organization known as Commercial Free Children discusses a U.S. research project that studied 1,000 families in total, concluding that the "passive activity" of watching television can cause language delays and be extremely harmful to children's attention spans and cognitive development. Another consequence that has been studied is impairment of frontal lobe development. The frontal lobe region of the brain is responsible for impulse control and ability to concentrate. Thus, damage to the frontal lobe can result in difficulty concentrating at school, as well socially inappropriate behavior.  Additionally, it has been demonstrated that during television viewing, brain activity switches from the left side of the brain to the right, where there is limited critical analysis of incoming information. A lack of critical analysis tends to lead to an inaccurate view of reality. Lastly, a significant, but underemphasized fact about television is its ability to cause physical addiction. When watching television, the body releases endorphins, a natural sedative with similar properties to heroin. The body may begin to crave the feeling of the endorphins and it is very probable for one to become addicted to watching television.

Now let us return to our original question: Are "brain stimulating" videos different? Christakis, also an avid researcher and pediatrician at the Children's Hospital in Seattle, responds to the claims made by the producers of these videos, stating that "there's absolutely no scientific evidence in support of those claims, nor is there any scientific basis theoretically to believe them." The effects he and his research team have found have been similar to those caused by watching regular television. Babies who watch these videos demonstrate slower neurological development; for example, their vocabularies are much more limited compared to those who never watch them. According to Time Magazine's Alice Park, all that these baby videos are doing is producing "a generation of over-stimulated kids." While we may assume that excessive stimulation for our babies would be beneficial to them, actually, the more television they watch, the shorter their attention spans become. According to Chistakis, "their minds come to expect a high level of stimulation, and view that as normal, and by comparison, reality is boring." 

            The one beneficial aspect to these videos that should be embraced by all parents is that of the music, specifically classical. A phenomenon known as the "Mozart Effect" suggests that early childhood exposure to classical music has a beneficial effect on mental development. The term was first coined by French researcher Dr. Alfred A. Tomatis, and popularized by American author and music researcher Don Campbell. According to Campbell, "Tomatis's innovative research is based on the ear's ability to discriminate between sounds it selects to hear and the ability to tune out sounds that are unwanted." The ear's ability to listen, select sounds spatially, and regulate auditory information that is perceived by the brain, helps individuals with speech and communication disorders, attention deficit disorders, head injuries, and autism. For years, neuroscientists and researchers like Tomatis and Campbell have been investigating music's role in babies' developing brains. And according to many like them, the correlation between music and brain development is also results in a quicker understanding of language, better motor movements, and enhanced spatial understanding.