It was inevitable, given the pace of medical advancement. I just didn't think it would happen so soon. The fusion of classical music and bowel health, I mean. Every so often, a research paper emerges that greatly advances our understanding of our own interiors. We’ll have to put the recent article in the latest issue of Microbiology Spectrum in that category. It claims that playing Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major, K. 448 can do amazing things for our colons.
The bowel has been the butt of so many jokes. That's fine. Go ahead and laugh. One day, your colon will be in a cranky mood, and you will wish you'd been kinder.
The medical profession used to think the colon was just a handy place to store things until we could find a bathroom. It turns out the colon is a much more complicated place. One complicated bowel function is something called the "Mozart Effect" that involves what researchers call the "gut-brain axis”. You might conclude that a gut-brain axis has something to do with the person who cut you off in traffic last week, but no. It has to do with babies listening to music to get smarter. And according to some researchers, the gut-brain axis plays a role in keeping our bowel happy.
All of this new research is important because it shows that an intestine listening to tasteful music is a contented intestine, and that Mozart was not only a musical genius who composed the Sonata in D Major but may also have moonlighted as a gastroenterologist.
It seems a musically inclined and bored researcher decided to play this piece of music and see how a mouse colon would respond. We may never know why that researcher thought this was an area ripe for study, but I bet his or her parents wish they hadn't wasted so much money on their child's education.
To everyone's amazement, the mouse not only developed a stronger immune system, but was much happier because the Sonata in D Major tickled the mouse's gut-brain axis. I question the "happier" part, because probing a mouse's bowel would not seem at first glance to make that mouse happier. You're also probably wondering, as I was after reading this, if the mouse bowel is quite as tickled if the researcher plays "Gangnam Style" by PSY.
After playing the Sonata the researcher went ahead and played the same piece of Mozart music in different keys to see if the bowel remained happy. But the colon was not fooled. It only felt truly fulfilled if the music was in the key of D. This is a level of sophistication you probably weren't expecting from a large, flaccid organ.
What does this research portend for the future? We will have to wait and see if any mice are okay with this, but I think it would be interesting to have someone implant a tiny boom box in a mouse bowel…a boom box that plays "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" by the late Andy Williams, over and over, just like what we experience every Christmas season. I know what that does to my bowel.