DT's music helps to improve spatial temporal reasoning.

[Sacul]

Check out this.

"In 2 of the tasks, subjects exposed to the Dream Theater piece achieved approximately 30% more improvement [...] than those exposed to the Mozart piece [...] or to no music..."

I wonder what song did the scientists chose.

Link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23154636

[Kotowboy]

The Answer Lies Within.

[Prog Snob]

Do we have anyone here with the ability to access the full article?

[Cable]

My 2nd university login has expired. Someone who goes to one should have access to it via their library; someone please use Googlescholar.com through their university login!

[Lucien]

Holy crap, DT's intention all along was to make for a smarter world!  Sneaky awesome bastards.

[gentaishinigami]

That.... is amazing.  This is only confirming what we've all known to be true this whole time though! 

Should rename it the "Dream Theater Effect" though, and list the side-effect of extremely poor live-show clap timing.

[puppyonacid]

Just showed this to my boss in an effort to convince him that we should play DT in the office.

Funny how people remain unconvinced about something despite the weight of evidence.

[wasteland]

Ok, that's a funny turn. Even funnier would be finding out that the authors used Raw Dog or You Not Me for their experiment. :

[The Stray Seed]

Man, this is amazing!! And I really dig the "DTE" (Dream Theater Effect) thing!

[Onno]

Do we have anyone here with the ability to access the full article?

I have! They used Stream of Consciousness 

Four pieces of digital media were used in this study: an instructional video, a short story, pieces by Mozart, and Dream Theater. A 5-minute instructional video was recorded to describe the experiment and provide a standardized demonstration of the tasks. The short story on tape was "An Incident at Owl Creek Bridge" by Ambrose Bierce. Its running length was 15 minutes and 25 seconds. The first and the beginning portion of the second movement of the Mozart piece were acquired separately and spliced into one 10-minute music file with an 18-second gap of silence between them. "Stream of Consciousness," a piece from the progressive metal band Dream Theater, was truncated to 10 minutes. All the sound files were accompanied by the standard "Alchemy" visualization produced by Windows Media Player version 7.

[MrBoom_shack-a-lack]

In 2 of the tasks, subjects exposed to the Dream Theater piece achieved approximately 30% more improvement (26.7 ± 8.3%) than those exposed to the Mozart piece (20.2 ± 7.8%, P = .021) or to no music (20.4 ± 9.1%, P = .049).

Suck it Mozart.

[Prog Snob]

Do we have anyone here with the ability to access the full article?

I have! They used Stream of Consciousness 

Four pieces of digital media were used in this study: an instructional video, a short story, pieces by Mozart, and Dream Theater. A 5-minute instructional video was recorded to describe the experiment and provide a standardized demonstration of the tasks. The short story on tape was "An Incident at Owl Creek Bridge" by Ambrose Bierce. Its running length was 15 minutes and 25 seconds. The first and the beginning portion of the second movement of the Mozart piece were acquired separately and spliced into one 10-minute music file with an 18-second gap of silence between them. "Stream of Consciousness," a piece from the progressive metal band Dream Theater, was truncated to 10 minutes. All the sound files were accompanied by the standard "Alchemy" visualization produced by Windows Media Player version 7.

AWESOME!   

[ZKX-2099]

Ok, that's a funny turn. Even funnier would be finding out that the authors used Raw Dog or You Not Me for their experiment. :

I would call it a... dramatic turn.

[mikeyd23]

In 2 of the tasks, subjects exposed to the Dream Theater piece achieved approximately 30% more improvement (26.7 ± 8.3%) than those exposed to the Mozart piece (20.2 ± 7.8%, P = .021) or to no music (20.4 ± 9.1%, P = .049).

Suck it Mozart.

Haha wow, that's actually really interesting... This is a legit study to, its from the National Institutes of Health.

[FsF]

Believe it or not, this corroborates a Biology experiment I did around a decade ago, in my last year at school before university. Played 2 mice various types of music for 10 minutes or so (numerous times over a few weeks), before sending them through a maze. Every type of music I played resulted in a faster maze time than pure silence, with prog rock (Rush) coming out tops. I think classical music was in second, with some Boards of Canada ambient stuff in 3rd.

[Jaffa]

Do we have anyone here with the ability to access the full article?

I have! They used Stream of Consciousness 

I guess it turns out prog snobs actually have a point?

[Prog Snob]

Do we have anyone here with the ability to access the full article?

I have! They used Stream of Consciousness 

I guess it turns out prog snobs actually have a point?

[lithium112]

Wow this is really cool. I'd love to read the full study.

[Ravenfoul]

That is both certainly cool, weird and altogether horrible for my ego.

[Shine]

From what I've read so far, it seems that Stream of Consciousness was originally intended to be the control group to compare against the Mozart. The experimenters were expecting SoC to have a lesser effect on the listeners, but when they reviewed the data were surprised to find that SoC actually improved performance the most. They actually had to add a third, No Listening group after they performed their initial tests in order to get a better baseline for comparison.

From the report, "Despite the expectation that the Mozart piece would affect a greater improvement in performance than the Dream Theater piece, the Mozart piece was numerically inferior. Comparing the total absolute improvement after 3 trials, the Dream Theater piece allowed for 8% more enhancement than the Mozart piece and 13% more than No Listening."

[jonnybaxy]

The guitar solo pressured them into doing better.

[Lucidity]

They actually had to add a third, No Listening group after they performed their initial tests in order to get a better baseline for comparison.

Hey, Stream of Consciousness has some great basslines!

[GasparXR]

They actually had to add a third, No Listening group after they performed their initial tests in order to get a better baseline for comparison.

Hey, Stream of Consciousness has some great basslines!

Not sure if or

[Lucien]

They actually had to add a third, No Listening group after they performed their initial tests in order to get a better baseline for comparison.

Hey, Stream of Consciousness has some great basslines!

Not sure if or

Definitely

[Mr. Ister]

It's a cute article, but unfortunately is extremely inconclusive (like a majority of research on the Mozart effect) and I'm honestly surprised it was accepted for publication.  I did quite a bit of research into the Mozart effect in my first couple years of grad school, and the bottom line was that it was a remote effect that, even if observed, only lasts for 10-15 minutes and is likely attributable to arousal, mood, and/or preference.  The fact that this study didn't measure ANY of those variables is a huge red flag to me.  Further, none of the comparisons were significantly different than each other.  So in the end, although group means were slightly different, you can NOT say they were technically different than each other from a statistical standpoint.  The entire crux of the Discussion is based off this "what if" theory centered around mean differences (meaningless) when the statistical analyses did not reveal differences between groups (meaningful).  The only way to maybe get around this would have been to report effect sizes, which could suggest that a genuine effect exists in a larger sample, but this was omitted as well (red flag #2).  It baffles me that they only included 15-20 people in each group, didn't find any differences, reported lack of findings, and somehow this was published (red flag #3).

Also, this research wasn't sponsored by the NIH.  As with all peer-reviewed studies, it is uploaded to the NIH Public Access system for compliance purposes, but the author reports receiving no funding to conduct the study.

Sorry to come off as a debbie downer but it's improper interpretation of shady studies that pollutes our news and misinforms interested laymen.