Researchers Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw and Katherine Ky completed a study on the Mozart effect, the influence classical music has on the brain, in 1993. Their discovery was that college students who listened to Mozart performed better with spacial reasoning tasks than students who listened to other things such as silence during that time.
Scientists Herman Steinmetz, Gottfried Schlaug, and their University of Dusseldorf colleagues completed research on the influence that playing classical music has on parts of musician's brains. The study showed that a part of their brains--the planum temporale of the left hemisphere--was bigger than that part was in non-musicians. Another part of the brain--the nerve-fiber tract between the left and right hemispheres--was thicker than in non-musicians, .
Dartmouth music psychologist Petr Janata completed a study that showed that classical music encourages the right and left hemispheres of the brain to connect better than any other stimulus does. He also discovered that musicians who had played since they were children had corpus callosums, nerve fibers that connect the left and right hemisphere, that were up to 15 percent larger than non-musicians.