If I was played Eine Kleine Nachtmusik for 30 minutes, I don't think that I (unlike the carp) would find that terribly soothing. I might go a bit mad in fact.

There seems to be not enough studies looking into whether it is just Mozart that has this effect or whether it's classical music in general (and as to whether it's the music itself or whether it's a Pavlovian response).

And there seems so rarely to be a musicologist or professional performer asked to participate in these researches.

I wonder whether the point here is that we know very little about what is generally dismissed as the placebo effect - which seems to me to be a rather snotty way of saying that the body has its own resources of healing ability which need somehow to be triggered. 

It's not just music - I think this is the case with some "alternative" therapies (I dislike the term "alternative", because it turns Western medicine into a baseline, which I don't think is really justified).  Take homeopathy, for example.  Homeopathy is not even pseudo-science; it's utter nonsense.  A GCSE student who came up with the theory of homeopathy would (or ought to be) told by teacher to go away and do something sensible.  But there are undoubtedly people who claim, with justification, that it has made a difference.  What has happened is a sort of placebo effect, but I don't think that to use that terminology to dismiss it is useful (or, strictly speaking, scientific).  Something has happened and the genuine scientific approach is to try and understand it (and, at a secondary level, there is also a question about some of the philosophical and ethical issues that the use of what we think as placebos could give rise to - would it be right for a doctor to prescribe a "medicine" that he knows will not do what he is telling the patient it does?  The issue gives rise to some pretty fundamental questions about the relationship between professional and patient).

So, back to Mozart, we know that music has a powerful impact on mood and emotion (it's why members of this board are here, for a start).  I don't know enough about the brainwave theory, but it could be a starting point.  Is any work being done on Bach, whose qualities of regularity and clarity of structure could have a powerful subliminal effect?

All in all, much more research needed before we can dismiss any of this.

More of the same, but this time a bit more reasonable and not specifically (hooray!) linked to Mozart in this BBC piece:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7319024.stm

Very true...  one can't help noticing that all the "research" into this seems to be conducted by people who are selling something, and stand to gain financially from the "conclusions"

I'm reminded of Mozart's patron when aged 8, Anton Mesmer - who commissioned BASTIEN & BASTIENNE.  Mesmer (who entered the dictionary as the inventor of "Mesmerism", and derivatives such as "mesmerised") claimed to be able to cure major debilitating illnesses (including blindness) with his "hypnotic therapies".  When his attempted cure of the wunderkind pianist Mme Paradis resulted in her permanent blindness, he was chased out of Vienna.  His promises to fund Mozart's Grand Tour of Europe were never honoured.

Maybe even in B & B?   A village quack fixes love-disputes with a spell that goes "Ziggi-Zaggi Diggi-Daggy"??    (The text for the number was inserted into the libretto by Leopold Mozart, who'd commissioned it from one of his Court Trumpeters who dabbled in versifying as a sideline.  I can't imagine who it was aimed at )

The point about Brain Gym is that its two prescriptions - drinking water and taking mild exercise - are bound to be beneficial for kids in the classroom, as indeed they are for anyone else.  What is absolute nonsense is the idea that you need to sign up to an expensive programme supported by a completely bogus set of pseudo-scientific claims in order to achieve these results.  Brain buttons, anyone?  Connecting the left and right sides of the brain?  It's all nonsense.

Here is what happened when the founder of Brain Gym was grilled by Paxman on Newsnight:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjRhYP5faTU

The sad thing is that this nutter has managed to persuade an awful lot of schools to part with their money - which after all is our money - to buy his product.  Having said that I had expected someone who would give a better account of himself under questioning.

My own brush with Brain Gym came when I was still a school governor, three or four years ago. We had a presentation and demonstration from one of the Brain Gym people (which, inter alia, involved my being inveigled into massaging the school bursar's neck in front of the meeting, which was embarrassing for both of us).  Unfortunately for the salesman, one of my fellow governors was a neurosurgeon from the local hospital, who pointed out, politely but firmly, that his pitch was complete nonsense.