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Want your kids to grow up smarter? Have them study music. Want to hold off the mental ravages of old age? Listen to music. Want to get high (legally), feel ecstatic, make your pain disappear? Music is the cure for what ails you.

These are some of the conclusions recently reached by researchers at Dartmouth College and at the Montreal Neurological Institute. Dartmouth music psychologist Petr Janata led a team of scientists who studied the neural activity of people listening to music and determined that music prompts greater interconnectivity between the brain's two hemispheres and between the areas responsible for emotion and memory than does almost any other stimulus.

Janata's study, published in Science, reports that some areas of the brain are 5% larger in expert musicians than they are in people with little or no musical training, and that the auditory cortex in professional musicians is 130% denser than in non-musicians. Among musicians who began their musical studies in early childhood, the corpus callosum, a sort of bridge between the brain's hemispheres, can be up to 15% larger.

These figures, among the first to quantify neural adaptations to music, appear to support studies that claim that early exposure to music makes humans smarter. The research "shows this link between music theory and perception and brain function," according to Frances Rauscher, who studies music cognition at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh.

Dartmouth researchers used a magnetic resonance imager (MRI) machine to monitor the neural activities in eight volunteers, each of whom averaged 12 years of musical training, to determine which areas of the brain were utilized while performing musical tasks, measured by increased blood flow and neural activity. One fascinating discovery is that a region near the center of the forehead called the rostromedial prefrontal cortex, linking short-term and long-term memory areas with emotions, is the area that tracks and processes melodies. The same melody played repeated times for each individual elicited a slightly different neural pattern each time, which could account for differing responses to the same stimulus at different times. (Audiophiles note: This could explain why your system sounds different at different times. It's not the gear or the music, it's you.)

Janata described positive physiological adaptations as proof that "our minds internalize the music." MRI technology allowed researchers to see for the first time the neural pathways energized by music, according to David Huron, who leads the cognitive and systematic musicology laboratory at Ohio State University. Although the researchers used traditional Western music for the experiments, any type of music would elicit similar responses, stated Gordon Shaw and Mark Bodner, who study brain activity at the Music Intelligence Neural Development Institute in Irvine, CA.

The human response to music isn't just about neural density, of course. It's also about pleasure. In the November 18 edition of The Ottawa Citizen, Paul McKay reported on MRI work done at the Montreal Neurological Institute that conclusively ties pleasurable responses to music to the same areas of the brain that light up under the influence of "sex, chocolate, caffeine, champagne, and cocaine."

The brain also organizes itself to maximize the pleasure. Montreal researchers discovered what McKay calls "persuasive evidence that the brain tends to prune neural circuits for maximum pleasure the way a gardener cuts unproductive branches to make a rose bush bloom. Music, it seems, may make the brain bloom best because it literally electrifies, at lightning speed, a web of nerve paths in both hemispheres of our cerebral cortex that connect the neural clusters processing musical pitch, rhythm, harmony, melody, short term memory, long term memory, and emotions."