[jonnathanson]

My guess is that the same principle applies to crosswords (for example) that applies to lifting weights: you have to keep ramping up the difficulty in order to realize the benefits. If you're just doing the easy/comfortable crossword puzzle every day, you're not challenging yourself. A cognitive task that is actually challenging will probably yield a lot better results. Learning a new language, studying a new level of mathematics, taking up a new hobby, learning chess, etc. Every time a task becomes trivial, you need to increase the difficulty or find another task.

As for "listening to Mozart," that strikes me as an extremely passive (i.e., cognitively untaxing) activity. I've always been highly skeptical of the putative benefits of listening to music, because the brain is extremely good at "tuning out" ambient sounds. I'd be more inclined to believe there's some benefit if the listener actively attempts to listen and perform another task simultaneously. Trying to keep attention focused on two very complex tasks at once is challenging; simply kicking back and letting music stream in the background is not. I'm sure there are creative benefits to listening to complex and stimulating music, but one needs to be actively engaged in the music.

[dredmorbius]

As for "listening to Mozart," that strikes me as an extremely passive activity.

My lay theorizing on this: certain types of music (and much of the classical repetoire) helps relax the mind. We spend far too much of our time being grossly overstimulated, and I've found that a great many of the typical stimulations in a Western experience (advertising, technology, popular music, city streets, etc.) simply wear at me. Nature, nonlinear landscapes, classical (or earlier) Western music (there is some awfully annoying non-western music, Indonesian gamelan being very high on the annoyance list for me) help immensely in this regard.

Just as strength training is stimulus for growth that comes during recovery, I suspect music may be part of the downtime which helps the brain and/or emotional / stress aspects of the body recover. Meditation or similar practices might operate similarly.

Total armchair theory here, but it's what I've got.

[jonnathanson]

As armchair theory goes, it's not a bad one. Taking it one step further, I could see how classical music might activate / operate on some of the same brain patterns as certain sleep cycles. Sleep is well known to be our brain's equivalent of garbage collection and recovery.

[mrbrowning]

I believe when articles like this one talk about "listening to Mozart," they are indeed referring to active listening, which taxes recall (with regards to things like ongoing restatements of a prominent motive) and working memory (with regards to things like key changes or thematic development). In my intuitive experience, it tends to be a task that requires a certain threshold of concentration to even happen at all, like juggling. As with juggling, you could probably learn to combine another activity with it, but the benefits seem like they would be tenuous.

[jonnathanson]

If that's the case, then fair point. But I've seen a lot of articles that talk about the ostensible benefits of simply having Mozart (etc.) on in the background. It was hard to get a sense of which approach this article was talking about when mentioning the subject.

Passive/ambient listening may have some benefit to a small baby, whose brain is much more plastic and is generally responsive to interesting stimuli. But for adults, a more active and taxing activity is probably in order. I agree with you that the loci of improvement are probably concentration and recall.

[nicholassmith]

That principle fits, when training you have to make progressions and move up a weight level or increase your reps, or you plateau and don't see as many improvements. I imagine it's similar for 'mental muscles', you'll need to push your boundaries to build your levels.