Mozart and Intelligence

One of the more startling findings about early enrichment is the effect of music. You can hardly pick up a newspaper without seeing some kind of reference to how Mozart makes people smarter. The governor of Georgia recently proposed spending $105,000 of state money to provide every newborn baby with a compact disc of classical music, citing its positive effects on brain development and spatial and mathematical skills. What is it about classical music that is so good for mental function, and a...

 What Makes Something a Distinct Object?

Let me look at the envelope from a very basic point of view, that of the neurophysiology of raw perception itself. Forgive me if it’s a bit oversimple. Take me-on the back of your retina I’m upside down, focused at the center but fuzzy at the edges, two-dimensional, a barrage of photons releasing rhodopsin and triggering neural impulses along the visual nerve. At the same time, the pressure wave I’m setting up right now with all this talk is causing little hairs inside the cochlea, in your in...