Ask and answer stupid questions here! - Page 341

On September 14 2015 00:10 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:


It could be, but it's not necessarily true. Speaking of which, could you please post the studies that positively correlate classical music with intelligence? Obviously it's not a causal relationship, and I'm wondering if affluence/ socioeconomic status might be a lurking variable there, as perhaps the stereotypically affluent and refined and rich person is more likely to go to orchestras and listen to that kind of music (and therefore pass it on to their children), and so they might also have more academic and educational resources for their child as well (unrelated to music), which could help in the child's brain development.

You have probably heard of the Mozart effect. It’s the idea that if children or even babies listen to music composed by Mozart they will become more intelligent. A quick internet search reveals plenty of products to assist you in the task. Whatever your age there are CDs and books to help you to harness the power of Mozart’s music, but when it comes to scientific evidence that it can make you more clever, the picture is more mixed.

The phrase “the Mozart effect” was coined in 1991, but it is a study described two years later in the journal Nature that sparked real media and public interest about the idea that listening to classical music somehow improves the brain. It is one of those ideas that feels plausible. Mozart was undoubtedly a genius himself, his music is complex and there is a hope that if we listen to enough of it, a little of that intelligence might rub off on us.

The idea took off, with thousands of parents playing Mozart to their children, and in 1998 Zell Miller, the Governor of the state of Georgia in the US, even asked for money to be set aside in the state budget so that every newborn baby could be sent a CD of classical music. It’s not just babies and children who were deliberately exposed to Mozart’s melodies. When Sergio Della Sala, the psychologist and author of the book Mind Myths, visited a mozzarella farm in Italy, the farmer proudly explained that the buffalos were played Mozart three times a day to help them to produce better milk.

I’ll leave the debate on the impact on milk yield to farmers, but what about the evidence that listening to Mozart makes people more intelligent? Exactly what was it was that the authors of the initial study discovered that took public imagination by storm?

When you look back at the original paper, the first surprise is that the authors from the University of California, Irvine are modest in their claims and don’t even use the “Mozart effect” phrase in the paper. The second surprise is that it wasn’t conducted on children at all: it was in fact conducted with those stalwarts of psychological studies – young adult students. Only 36 students took part. On three occasions they were given a series of mental tasks to complete, and before each task, they listened either to ten minutes of silence, ten minutes of a tape of relaxation instructions, or ten minutes of Mozart’s sonata for two pianos in D major (K448).

The students who listened to Mozart did better at tasks where they had to create shapes in their minds. For a short time the students were better at spatial tasks where they had to look at folded up pieces of paper with cuts in them and to predict how they would appear when unfolded. But unfortunately, as the authors make clear at the time, this effect lasts for about fifteen minutes. So it’s hardly going to bring you a lifetime of enhanced intelligence.

Brain arousal

Nevertheless, people began to theorise about why it was that Mozart’s music in particular could have this effect. Did the complexity of music cause patterns of cortical firing in the brain similar to those associated with solving spatial puzzles?

More research followed, and a meta-analysis of sixteen different studies confirmed that listening to music does lead to a temporary improvement in the ability to manipulate shapes mentally, but the benefits are short-lived and it doesn’t make us more intelligent.

Then it began to emerge that perhaps Mozart wasn’t so special after all. In 2010 a larger meta-analysis of a greater number of studies again found a positive effect, but that other kinds of music worked just as well. One study found that listening to Schubert was just as good, and so was hearing a passage read out aloud from a Stephen King novel. But only if you enjoyed it. So, perhaps enjoyment and engagement are key, rather than the exact notes you hear.

Although we tend to associate the Mozart effect with babies and small children, most of these studies were conducted on adults, whose brains are of course at a very different stage of development. But in 2006 a large study was conducted in Britain involving eight thousand children. They listened either to ten minutes of Mozart’s String Quintet in D Major, a discussion about the experiment or to a sequence of three pop songs: Blur’s “Country House,” “Return of the Mack,” by Mark Morrison and PJ and Duncan’s “Stepping Stone”. Once again music improved the ability to predict paper shapes, but this time it wasn’t a Mozart effect, but a Blur effect. The children who listened to Mozart did well, but with pop music they did even better, so prior preference could come into it.

Whatever your musical choice, it seems that all you need to do a bit better at predictive origami is some cognitive arousal. Your mind needs to get a little more active, it needs something to get it going and that’s going to be whichever kind of music appeals to you. In fact, it doesn’t have to be music. Anything that makes you more alert should work just as well – doing a few star jumps or drinking some coffee, for instance.

There is a way in which music can make a difference to your IQ, though. Unfortunately it requires a bit more effort than putting on a CD. Learning to play a musical instrument can have a beneficial effect on your brain. Jessica Grahn, a cognitive scientist at Western University in London, Ontario says that a year of piano lessons, combined with regular practice can increase IQ by as much as three points.

So listening to Mozart won’t do you or your children any harm and could be the start of a life-long love of classical music. But unless you and your family have some urgent imaginary origami to do, the chances are that sticking on a sonata is not going to make you better at anything.

On September 14 2015 05:23 veQ wrote:
Also is humanity going downhill from now on onwards with evolution of internet/mobile devices around us. People stopped training(Exercising T_T? [cyclying once a week is not enough to change anything = sitting and doing nothing]) and now are just sitting down doing nothing [come back form work/school - spend the rest of time in front of display till you go to sleep - I have a person in home that has this symptome. (Which isnt the way humans used to live back then) Does that mean that future populations will be more fragile physically when it comes to genes?? Or do we need more time for this to take effect and be really shown?? Been considering this for a long time since my schedule got wrecked with work.

Wow this is dumb I hope you like it thanks

On September 14 2015 05:23 veQ wrote:
Since humans have the so called use it or lose it principle when it comes to muscles. Is it worth training your body in order to be stronger than your opponent or you can totally ignore it and still be stronger than other people who dont train?.
(Right before the qustion comes - regular exercises to keep muscles from dissapearing but not enough motivation to push myself to the limits - could run for 2 hours straight when had a picture of certain person in mind)

Cant seem to find any motivation since I left school and went to work to get back to my "old" training schedule.
As non drinker/smoker this really puts me off my mindset of getting better. Trying not to get down to modern level of being fashionable as male is not enough. + Show Spoiler +


Also is humanity going downhill from now on onwards with evolution of internet/mobile devices around us. People stopped training(Exercising T_T? [cyclying once a week is not enough to change anything = sitting and doing nothing]) and now are just sitting down doing nothing [come back form work/school - spend the rest of time in front of display till you go to sleep - I have a person in home that has this symptome. (Which isnt the way humans used to live back then) Does that mean that future populations will be more fragile physically when it comes to genes?? Or do we need more time for this to take effect and be really shown?? Been considering this for a long time since my schedule got wrecked with work.

Wow this is dumb I hope you like it thanks

On September 14 2015 05:23 veQ wrote:
Since humans have the so called use it or lose it principle when it comes to muscles. Is it worth training your body in order to be stronger than your opponent or you can totally ignore it and still be stronger than other people who dont train?.
(Right before the qustion comes - regular exercises to keep muscles from dissapearing but not enough motivation to push myself to the limits - could run for 2 hours straight when had a picture of certain person in mind)

Cant seem to find any motivation since I left school and went to work to get back to my "old" training schedule.
As non drinker/smoker this really puts me off my mindset of getting better. Trying not to get down to modern level of being fashionable as male is not enough. + Show Spoiler +


Also is humanity going downhill from now on onwards with evolution of internet/mobile devices around us. People stopped training(Exercising T_T? [cyclying once a week is not enough to change anything = sitting and doing nothing]) and now are just sitting down doing nothing [come back form work/school - spend the rest of time in front of display till you go to sleep - I have a person in home that has this symptome. (Which isnt the way humans used to live back then) Does that mean that future populations will be more fragile physically when it comes to genes?? Or do we need more time for this to take effect and be really shown?? Been considering this for a long time since my schedule got wrecked with work.

Wow this is dumb I hope you like it thanks

On September 14 2015 05:23 veQ wrote:
Since humans have the so called use it or lose it principle when it comes to muscles. Is it worth training your body in order to be stronger than your opponent or you can totally ignore it and still be stronger than other people who dont train?.
(Right before the qustion comes - regular exercises to keep muscles from dissapearing but not enough motivation to push myself to the limits - could run for 2 hours straight when had a picture of certain person in mind)

Cant seem to find any motivation since I left school and went to work to get back to my "old" training schedule.
As non drinker/smoker this really puts me off my mindset of getting better. Trying not to get down to modern level of being fashionable as male is not enough. + Show Spoiler +


Also is humanity going downhill from now on onwards with evolution of internet/mobile devices around us. People stopped training(Exercising T_T? [cyclying once a week is not enough to change anything = sitting and doing nothing]) and now are just sitting down doing nothing [come back form work/school - spend the rest of time in front of display till you go to sleep - I have a person in home that has this symptome. (Which isnt the way humans used to live back then) Does that mean that future populations will be more fragile physically when it comes to genes?? Or do we need more time for this to take effect and be really shown?? Been considering this for a long time since my schedule got wrecked with work.

Wow this is dumb I hope you like it thanks

On September 14 2015 22:03 OtherWorld wrote:

I'm not particularly fond of fashion or of spending a lot of time on my appearance, but I don't get that idea that "being male" = "not giving a shit about the way I look/smell/whatever". There have been many, many eras in the past during which men were spending much more time and according much more importance to being decently fashionable than today.

On September 14 2015 22:03 OtherWorld wrote:

I'm not particularly fond of fashion or of spending a lot of time on my appearance, but I don't get that idea that "being male" = "not giving a shit about the way I look/smell/whatever". There have been many, many eras in the past during which men were spending much more time and according much more importance to being decently fashionable than today.

On September 15 2015 22:24 ThomasjServo wrote:

If the prevalence of peanut allergy in Africa is similar to the US, less than 1% of those who tried it, likely under .5% considering I doubt every allergic reaction was fatal.

Interestingly enough, I couldn't turn up peanut allergy stats by country save for western countires.

Problems With Peanuts: Allergies in Africa
While widespread distribution of a peanut-based product like Plumpy'nut could pose a danger to allergy-prone children in the United States, that is not a concern on the African continent.

"Food allergy seems far less common in poor countries than in rich countries," said Briend. "This well-known observation has been explained by different factors, but apparently, crowding and repeated exposure to infections seem to play a role."

The dearth of allergies and asthma in developing nations, and the rapid growth of these ailments in industrialized countries (registered peanut allergies in the United States doubled from 1997-2002), is largely attributed to the hygiene hypothesis, a topic addressed in an April 2002 article in Science magazine called "Allergy, Parasites and the Hygiene Hypothesis."

On September 14 2015 22:23 Acrofales wrote:

You need some self-esteem.

On September 14 2015 22:23 Acrofales wrote:
That said, your disgust for your fellow human beings is pretty appalling, and your vocabulary is reminiscent of shauny (in case you don't know shauny; that is not a good thing) in your treatment of women and homosexuals. As a 34-year old looking at "kids of 17-23" I see all kinds of people, including you. Yes, you are one of "them"! I have no idea where you live either that your regular method of "appealing to some random pussy" is by OHKO'ing others. It sounds like a hollywood parody of the stone age...

On September 14 2015 22:23 Acrofales wrote:
So if we start from the premise that you represent the future of humanity, it is not only going downhill, it has already gone down the shitter. Thankfully, you don't. And regarding the future of humanity, you should stop worrying about what the lack of exercising means to the gene pool (it means precisely nothing). Lack of exercise, and unhealthy living in general, has a whole host of negative effects, including male infertility. Also, our physical fragility is completely beside the point, when our survival depends far more on whether the Kim Jong-Uns of this world are smart enough to not press the big red button, than whether or not they are in peak physical condition. Humans' physical fragility is firstly, grossly overrated, and secondly, completely beside the point since the first homo erectus learned to craft weapons.

On September 14 2015 22:23 Acrofales wrote:Thankfully, you don't.

On September 15 2015 23:04 veQ wrote:
How many warns before you get banned (and if you do because of it its permanent???) [was it 3?] | do they get removed or are also permanent?

On September 15 2015 23:04 veQ wrote:


Maybe I need it. Another thing to consider - Thanks



Uh.. yeah I rarely use my national language. The fact being is that as the "lone wolf" type theres no need to speak when not needed. I use more english but the vocabulary of the latter is limited by the former which isnt really that vast as it should be. I dont intend to depend on other people the reason is that if I want to get something done I have to do it myself theres no other way.
Call me narrow-minded but thats how thing are for me.

And uh pardon but u got that part wrong. Its just I cant stand the modern standards of fashion these days.[Is this correct sentence? Why I am asking? take a look at the bottom :C] I wont change myself also Im in the age where kinds will try to show whos the boss/try to prove you are the weak one and should get out immediately. So the correct answer to that is to be better than your agrresor.
it was in something [movie?] dont quote me on that - Its either you who gives the beating or the one who gets beaten. So theres no way im goona let some random punk get the better of me.


In the grand scope I think you are correct. Still I wanst thingking that vastly.[?]
Wha do you mean by

And a question.

How many warns before you get banned (and if you do because of it its permanent???) [was it 3?] | do they get removed or are also permanent?