Listen to this PodcastMore 60-Second Science
Opera and classical music can relax you – and maybe your immune system, if results with mice extend to us. Because mice that got heart transplants and who listened to opera and classical music had better outcomes than those exposed to other sounds. The work is in the Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery. [Masateru Uchiyama et al., "Auditory stimulation of opera music induced prolongation of murine cardiac allograft survival and maintained generation of regulatory CD4+CD25+ cells"]
A mismatched organ transplant typically gets rejected. After receiving mismatched heart transplants, mice spent a week hearing silence, a single-frequency tone, or one of three types of music: Verdi's La Traviata, Mozart, or the New Age artist Enya.
The strong immune response in the control mice and those who listened to single frequencies caused rejection after a week, and the Enya group lasted only a few days more. But the hearts in the Mozart group beat for 20 days and the Traviata group survived 26 days.
Perhaps classical music calms the immune system, decreasing its responsiveness – the Traviata mice had fewer white blood cells and immune-signaling molecules. Or maybe mice just prefer Verdi to Enya.
—Sophie Bushwick
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]
See what we're tweeting about
7 Comments
Add CommentI tried to find the number of mice used in the experiments and how or if experimenters who manipulated the mice ("Postoperatively, cardiac graft function was assessed daily by palpating the heart for evidence of contraction", etc) were blinded to the conditions.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe abstract and article are called "provisional" and seem to be missing the above, tables, figures, etc
This bit made me smile:
"A fourth possible mechanism for the opera-induced hyporesponsiveness in our model is that
exposure to music increased, rather than decreased, stress. Numerous studies have found that stress
can suppress the immune response ..."
Since mice are relatively small animals the frequency range of their hearing will be much higher than humans - they will be unable to hear the lower notes. Thus what they hear will be have completely different feeling characteristics than for the humans for which the music is designed - we cannot say one type of music is more calming or interesting than another for them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am at a loss to imagine what would be the motivation for designing research like this - and why it would be funded.
http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=118598&CultureCode=en
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe webpage above bring a better notion about the meaning of that research.
It is not well known but when certain characteristic mannerisms of mice in the presence of music (jazz, symphonic, fusion…) were recorded with high speed cameras, it was noticed that the resulting slowed-down twitchings, jumps, vocalizations etc., resolved into episodes of finger snapping, toe tapping, hip & tail
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisgyrations and an odd medley of high pitched, "Oh yeahs, oh man how cool is this!!," and combos of, "Oompa wop diddy… tzeebie tzeebie tzeebie voomp," complete with intense brushings of whiskers. No really.
Full article available here: http://www.cardiothoracicsurgery.org/content/pdf/1749-8090-7-26.pdf
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerhaps the most striking result is not mentioned above:
-Untreated, CBA mice with tympanic membrane perforations and CBA recipients exposed to opera for 7 days before transplantation (pre-treatment) rejected B6 cardiac grafts acutely (MSTs, 7, 8 and 8 days,
respectively)
(other groups survived 20-25 days).
... so if you put mice under a lot of stress -- make them go deaf -- they don't do very well.
As the article states, apparently "Paint the Sky with Stars: The Best of Enya" didn't make them survive longer but "The Ultimate All Mozart, Berlin Philharmonic" did.
Well having read the full article, and assuming the results are bona fide, I have 3 comments:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1) The authors in their introduction refer extensively to the beneficial rehabilitating effects of music therapy in humans. However humans have a hearing frequency range of 12Hz to 20kHz whereas mice have a hearing frequency range of 1kHz to 70kHz. This means that the mice are not hearing what we hear - they are missing everything below 2-octaves-above-middle-C, so they are only hearing the very highest notes in the music, and they are hearing all those notes as bass notes since they are at the bottom of their range - the eqivalent of somebody rumbling away on the bottom third of a piano keyboard. Thus to the mice this is not music in any sense we think of it - it is an auditory effect - auditory therapy rather than music therapy if the researchers want to extrapolate to humans. (It would be easy enough to process the types of music used to hear what the effect would sound like to humans.)
2) It is important to acknowledge that the effect of this auditory input is a suppression of the immune system - although in this case it helps the survival of the mice because it suppresses rejection, this is not normally healthy and would not be a desired trait in human music therapy for stroke rehabilitation for example. So again it has little similarity to human music therapy.
3) If the effects of sound on the results of animal clinical tests are this profound, it brings into question all other animal research - are the researchers sometimes playing music for themselves while they work, what about smells, lighting ambience etc etc.
Your #3 is an eye opener, not only for animal research but human research as well. How does the scientific community fix this issue other than headphones for all? (Besides, those little mouse earphones would be difficult to manufacture!) :)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisKidding aside, you observation holds a lot of merit!