Published without attribution or any details in the China Daily:
The latest summer camp organized by the Shanghai local government is applying Mozart’s music to improving students’ math scores.One group of student campers solved geometry problems with Mozart sonatas playing in the background. The control group worked minus Mozart.
The average score of the group working to Mozart rose 62 percent from their previous test scores. The control group’s average score only increased 14 percent. [emphasis added]
Illustration of a Boy Jumping into a Mathematics Textbook
Carol and Mike Werner
This was filed under “Odd News” as if somehow these results were unexpected. My own readers should know better by now! However there is something interesting here, in that one would expect these children to have been brought up on a diet of their local popular music, and therefore not be familiar with European form; yet here their brains are happily responding to Mozart in exactly the same way as any European or North American child’s brain would respond.
So regardless of the musical forms one is presented with in childhood, there is something about European classical music that our brains respond to on a level that transcends culture.