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Compulsory schooling does not begin until age 7. “We have no hurry,” said Louhivuori. “Children learn better when they are ready. Why stress them out?”

“It was simply the idea that every child would have a very good public school. If we want to be competitive, we need to educate everybody. It all came out of a need to survive.”

Trainor suggested that the reason for this is that the motor and listening skills needed to play an instrument in concert with other people appears to heavily involve attention, memory and the ability to inhibit actions. Merely listening passively to music to Mozart -- or any other composer -- does not produce the same changes in attention and memory.

Harvard University researcher Gottfried Schlaug has also studied the cognitive effects of musical training. Schlaug and his colleagues found a correlation between early-childhood training in music and enhanced motor and auditory skills as well as improvements in verbal ability and nonverbal reasoning.

The correlation between music training and language development is even more striking for dyslexic children. "[The findings] suggest that a music intervention that strengthens the basic auditory music perception skills of children with dyslexia may also remediate some of their language deficits." Schlaug said.

Shahin's main findings are that the changes triggered by listening to musical sound increases with age and the greatest increase occur between age 10 and 13. This most likely indicates this as being a sensitive period for music and speech acquisition.

passive listening to music seems to help a person perform certain cognitive tests, at least in the short run. Actual music lessons for kids, however, leads to a longer lasting cognitive success.

Mac users are better educated (67 percent of Mac users completed a four-year degree, while only 54 percent of PC users did so), more liberal (58 versus 36 percent), more urban (52 percent said they live in a city while PC users tended to live in rural or suburban areas) and younger (18-34 demographic) than their PC counterparts (who tended to be more in the 35-49 demographic).

PC users, the survey found, like fitting in over "making their own mark" (twice as often as Mac users); prefer staying at home to "partying"; enjoy mainstream TV shows (such as "The Tonight Show") and TV channels (The History Channel, Syfy, USA) much more than Mac users (who tend towards edgier shows like "Parks and Recreation" and channels like Bravo, Showtime and HBO); they prefer to be "later adopters" of technology and are twice as likely to find it a "struggle" that's akin to learning a foreign language, and PC users tend to stick with well-established brands in everything from restaurants to painters, while Mac users bent towards the newer, more fashionable trends.