Mozart in AVF testing
- Correspondence to: Robert Stamper UCSF, 10 Koret Way, Room K301 San Francisco, CA 94143, USA; stamper{at}itsa.ucsf.edu
An improvement in our visual field testing process would be most welcome
The 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth is upon us. As if his musical genius, exhibited even as a child, needed any additional lustre, the past decade has seen claims that exposure to his music is associated not only with aesthetic pleasure but with better mathematics skills, enhanced brain development in utero, improved learning among college students, and improved spatial-temporal reasoning and performance in rats and college students.1,2 Since visual field testing does involve spatial and temporal processing, Macedo and her colleagues thought that pre-exposure to a Mozart piece might help medical students perform better on their first automated threshold perimetry. What a nice birthday present for Wolfgang that their study, published in this issue of BJO (p 543), concludes that listening to one of his sonata’s for two pianos seems to improve the reliability of one’s first visual field! “Roll over Beethoven!”
Before all perimetrists run out and buy …
