Happy classical music can boost brain power

FOR a student sweating miserably over a late-night essay, switching on a recording of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons may not seem an obvious solution.

But listening to classical music may enhance brain power and is better than working in silence, a study has found. However, not any classical music will do.

The study by Radboud University in Holland found that people’s ability to come up with creative answers to complex problems was boosted specifically by upbeat, happy compositions.

It means toiling away to Lakmé’s Flower Duet, or Ode to Joy in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, is likely to yield good results.

But people would be better off steering clear of downbeat works such as Schubert’s Winterreise or the graver moments in Mahler. Some 155 volunteers split into five groups and heard pieces of classical music judged to be either happy, calm, sad or anxious. The other group sat in silence.

The happy group listened to Vivaldi’s Spring, while the calm group were played The Swan from Saint-saën’s Carnival of the Animals. The anxious group listened to Holst’s The Planets: Mars, Bringer of War and the sad group to Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber.

While listening, they were given a number of cognitive tasks to perform in order to test their creativity such as word association games and insight problems.

The study concluded that those who had listened to the happy music were able to generate more innovative solutions to those who sat in silence or listened to sad or anxious music. The research was published in the journal PLOS One.