(Extracted from《SCIENCE》VOL. 283, NO. 5410) Nowadays, many parents and daycare institutions expose children to classical music in order to trigger the so-called "Mozart effect" - some classical concerts are said to sharpen the brain. Now, the researchers who initiated this trend, Gordon Shaw of the Universityof California, Irvine, and his colleagues, have presented evidence that piano lessons can improve children's performance in proportional math tests.

Six years ago, Shaw's team discovered that listening to a Mozart's two-piano sonata could briefly improve the spatial skills of college students. They subsequently reported that piano lessons gavea sustained boost to spatial skills in preschoolers.

In the latest study, Shaw compared three groups of second-graders: 26 got piano instruction plus a math video game that trained players to mentally rotate shapes and to use them to learn ratios and fractions. Another 29 people received computer-based English training plus the math video game. A control group of 28 did not receive special training. The author reported in the current issue of Neurological Research after four months later, the results were "dramatic".

The piano group scored 15% higher than the English group in a test of what they had learned in the computer game - and 27% higher on the questions devoted to proportional math. These gains were on top of the finding that the computer game alone boosted scores by 36% over the control group.

Shaw says the improvements suggest that spatial awareness and the need to think several steps ahead - both required in piano playing - reinforce latent neuronal patterns. “Music is just tapping into this internal neural structure that we're born with,” he says. Piano lessons may well condition the brain just as muscle-building conditions an athlete, says Michael Merzenich, a neuroanatomist at the University of California, San Francisco. Music may be a “skill … more fundamental than language” for refining the ability of the brain to make spatial and temporal distinctions, he says.