Mozart Music Improves Peripheral Vision Of Glaucoma Patients
by Christian Nordqvist
A Brazilian study has found that Mozart music improved patients' performance in a sight test aimed at checking peripheral vision of people with glaucoma. You can read about this study in the British Journal of Ophthalmology.
Thirty patients were divided into two groups and given ten minutes to prepare for the test. Half of them listened to Mozart's sonata while the other half had no music. None of the patients had ever taken the test before. Both groups had equal proportions of men and women, and the same ethnic range.
In this test patients have to identify shapes in different backgrounds and press a button when they see the shape. The shapes are of the same or similar colour(s) as the background.
The researchers found that the group who had listened to music performed better. They also found that the beneficial effect of the music wore off ten minutes after they stopped listening to it.
Other studies have linked listening to Mozart music with better mathematics scores, enhanced learning among university students, and even benefits for the foetal brain. Study author, Venessa Macedo, Santa Casa, Sao Paulo, Brazil, said that as well as improving spatial-temporal reasoning, the music might also be helping the processing of data from the eye to the brain. Whether the music enhanced the results, or the silence undermined results, is something the researchers are not sure about, said Macedo.
However, ten minutes' silence is not usually enough time to raise anxiety levels to such an extent as to affect results. However, ten minutes of Mozart music could.
If it was the music, it did not start curing the patients' eyesight. For ophthalmologists this experiment is interesting because it could become a way of obtaining more reliable test results.
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