Don Campbell

Thoughts descend from the head and converge in the voice before they are articulated, while feelings are primarily experienced as rising up from below the voice, with love and passion coming from the heart and grief and sadness from the stomach.

Summary

Don Campbell, a classical musician and former music critic, is a recognized authority on the transformative power of music, listening, and The Mozart Effect.

He expanded the definition of The Mozart Effect, first proposed by Alfred Tomatis, to include the influence of music on intelligence, health, emotions, and creativity. (see The Music of Biodanza and Methodology 1: Musical Semantics).

Ideas

• Music is Transformational - Listening to music can transform intelligence, health, emotions and creativity.
• Music Benefits Children - Playing classical music to infants will benefit their mental development. Music is the perfect tool to improve children's language, movement, and emotional skills at home, school, and play.
• Music Heals - Music can be used to heal more than 50 common illnesses.

The Mozart Effect

The Mozart Effect is the name attributed to psychologists' findings in 1993, that playing Mozart to their subjects increases their spatial-temporal reasoning.

The Mozart Effect represents:

• The use of music to improve the health of individuals and communities,
• The use of music to improve memory and awareness,
• Innovative and experimental use of music to improve listening and attention deficit disorders,
• Therepeutic uses of music to treat mental and physical disorders and injuries,
• The use of music for imagery and visualisation, to stimulate creativity, and reduce depression and anxiety.

It was first described by French researcher, Dr. Alfred A. Tomatis, in his 1991 book Pourquoi Mozart?. He used the music of Mozart in his efforts to retrain the ear, and believed that listening to the music presented at differing frequencies helped the ear, and promoted healing and the development of the brain.

Further studies, Music and Spatial Task Performance: A Causal Relationship, were performed in 1993 by physicist Gordon Shaw and Frances Rauscher, a former concert cellist and an expert on cognitive development. They measured the effects on a few dozen college students of listening to the first 10 minutes of the Mozart Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major (K.448), with control groups listening to either repetitive relaxation music or to silence. They found a temporary enhancement of spatial-temporal reasoning, as measured by the Stanford-Binet IQ Test. There were many attempts to replicate their results but most were unsuccessful.

The 1997 book by Don Campbell, The Mozart Effect: Tapping the Power of Music to Heal the Body, Strengthen the Mind, and Unlock the Creative Spirit, discusses the theory that listening to Mozart (especially his piano concertos) may temporarily increase one's IQ and produce many other beneficial effects on mental function. He recommends playing specially selected classical music to infants, in the expectation that it will benefit their mental development.

His belief is that music can be used to to reduce stress, depression, or anxiety; induce relaxation or sleep; activate the body; and improve memory or awareness. The book cites fifty common conditions where music has made a difference, curing symptoms and changing lives. These conditions include high blood pressure, heart disease, AIDs, allergies, asthma, dyslexia, migraine headaches, back pain, substance abuse, anxiety, insomnia, pregnancy and labour, menopause, stroke rehabilitation, diabetes and cancer.

After a brain scan he learned that he had a potentially fatal blood clot in an artery just below his brain. He managed to shrink the blood clot by humming quietly, for three to four minutes at a time, up to seven times a day. After three weeks a second brain scan showed a reduction in size from from more than an inch and a half in length to an eighth of an inch.