If you thought it was too late to realise those dreams of becoming an expert musician, wielding the perfect ear for pitch, time to think again. A new study at Harvard University shows there may be a new pill you can pop which opens up your brain and gets you well on your way to achieving tonal perfection.
There’s a lot of debate as to the origins of perfect pitch, or absolute pitch, a phenomenon where a person can readily identify any given musical note without referencing another. Mozart showed signs of the skill at the age of three, Ella Fitzgerald‘s band would tune their instruments to the perfect pitch of her voice and Florence Henderson, aka Mrs Brady, got a college scholarship due to her pitch-perfect singing talent.
Whilst the skill is partially genetic, most believe that perfect pitch is a trait that develops only in early childhood, when our brains are more malleable and develop from early exposure and training in music. But thanks to new mild-altering drugs, scientists can now recreate this period of development and in essence teach grown-ups to sing like Mariah Carey. Or Michael Jackson, if you prefer.
Takao Hensch, professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard spoke to NPR’s Weekend Edition radio program about a “mood-stabilizing drug” which “restores the plasticity of the brain to a juvenile state”. Hensch says the drug, Valprioc Acid, allows the brain to absorb new information as easily as it did before age 7.
Over a two week period Hensch gave the drug to a group of healthy young men who had no musical training as children. During that time they performed online tasks to train their ears and at the end of the two weeks were tested on their ability to identify tone. The majority of the volunteers performed significantly better after two weeks of the drug.
“This is the result and it’s quite remarkable,” Hensch told NPR’s Linda Wertheimer. “Since there are no known reports of adults acquiring absolute pitch.” The findings, he said, could also lead to new developments in teaching new skills such as languages to adults. “The idea here was could we come up with a way that would reopen plasticity, paired with the appropriate training, allow adult brains to become young again,” said Hensch.
But as with all mind altering drugs, Hensch also warns of the dark side of tampering with our heads. “If we’ve shaped our identities through development, through a critical period and have matched our brain to the environment in which we were raised, acquiring language, culture, identity, then if we were to erase that by reopening a critical period, we run quite a risk as well,” he warns. Though Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet already taught us that lesson.
You can read the full study in Frontiers.
