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It stresses the strategic interdependent interests of humans and assumes that in games there is always a rational choice which is the best counter-choice to your opponent's.

If winning efficiently is the goal, then the rules (ethical, moral, legal, and spiritual), are essentially obstacles to game.

In our schools, competition for access to elite preschools, for grades, for social status, in sports, over positions of leadership, and for admission to exclusive colleges transforms one of our most basic institutions for fostering community, ethics and learning into competitive, individualistic corporate training-grounds. In these settings, the importance of competitive sports becomes paramount, for both financial and training purposes, and the artistry of cheating (see this year's Stuyvesant High School cheating scandal) and rule-bending (see Joe Paterno) revered. Such intense competition encourages the professionalization of parenting -- through tutors, highly-educated nannies, prep courses, and professional training camps (such as investment camps). You can imagine the deleterious effects these trends have on the ethos of care and moral responsibility in our families and schools, a critical buffer against bullying and violence in the lives of our children.

We become hyper-connected through technologies, boasting our number of "friends" on Facebook, and have less and less intimacy.

We choose friends with benefits or Internet porn over romantic relationships as they are less messy, more efficient.

Life is a race and we are losing.

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.