Transfer effects In recent years several long-term studies have been conducted (Spychiger 1988 - 1991; Bastian 1993 - 1998) to demonstrate that enhanced music lessons at school have an effect on social behaviour, creativity, openness, readiness for co-operation and even intellectual growth. The outcome of these studies was relatively poor and limited. Nevertheless, music educators are tempted to use those arguments for justification of music education in school curriculum in a political debate. The most spectacular effect has become well known as the so-called "Mozart effect". Here, it was demonstrated that listening to a Mozart sonata caused better results in a spatial-temporal reasoning task measured by an IQ test (Stanford Binet Intelligence Test) than other acoustic stimulation (Rauscher et al. 1995). This effect came under debate just recently because the results could not been replicated (Chabris 1999; Steele et al. 1999). On the other hand, there are reports on clinical case studies that show a therapeutic effect of Mozart's sonata on patients with Alzheimer's disease (Johnson et al. 1998) and Lennox-Gastaux syndrome (Hughes et al. 1999). Moreover, keyboard training studies (Rauscher 1997; Costa-Giomi 1997, Eastlund Gromko 1999) revealed a significant effect on spatial-temporal reasoning tasks. Moreover, rats that were exposed to the above mentioned Mozart sonata 30 days in utero and 60 days post-partum, were faster and did fewer mistakes in a maze experiment than controls (Rau-scher et a. 1998). However, what remains open is to identify the musical parameter that causes the effect: e.g. the rhythmic structure, the frequency of pitches, the harmonic tension, or the balanced interplay of unexpected and redundant information, or a combination of some those. Another possible transfer effect was discovered at the Chinese University of Hong Kong where researchers have found that music training improves verbal memory (Chan et al. 1998). Although that effect appears to present music as an agent for memory training, we must take into consideration that in Hong Kong the most commonly spoken Chinese dialect is Cantonese which, in fact, is a tonal language where verbal memory is very much equivalent to tonal memory. Therefore, music is supposed to have an effect on verbal memory. Most of the mentioned experiments indicate an immediate interaction between brain areas within the cortex and between cerebellum and cortex as well. The stimulation of neuronal tracks by music obviously functions as a trainer for the transmission of signals which are used for the activation of other brain functions. When talking about transfer effects we must carefully differentiate between internal brain effects, which are due to a stronger interaction between different brain areas and correlate various brain functions (like higher speed of signal transmission, stronger neuronal connection, co-activation of different cortical areas), and external effects that supposedly stimulate or strengthen skills in other than musical domains (as cognitive or behavioural skills like math or language, social sensitivity or readiness for collaboration etc.). There is, however, little evidence for the latter, but good reason for much more complex interaction between different brain areas - within the cortex and between cortical and subcortical layers - than we still know. Further research will discover and present more details. As to now, I would like to refer to two studies which demonstrate that kind of internal interaction very clearly . (1) In a long-term experiment (Bangert et al. 1999), subjects (novice piano students and professional pianists) were trained for 5 weeks to reproduce a short melody on a keyboard after aural presentation without any visual or verbal cues. Whereas one novice group were not given the opportunity to establish an internal map between motor events and auditory targets by a shuffled relation between keys and pitches after each training session, the other group developed a robust link between auditory and motor tasks. During the experiment, all subjects were repeatedly measured by EEG in a passive auditory and mute motor task. DC-EEGs record the excitatory post-synaptic potentials on the lowest frequency range caused by afferent inflow. Very soon - first effects appeared even after 20 minutes - the novices who had developed an internal map of aural and motor activities showed a co-activation of the left primary sensorimotor cortex in the auditory task, and a co-activation of bilateral frontolateral and temporal cortex in the motor task. Moreover, professional pianists, of course, have developed a robust link between internal representations of the musical ear and their musical hand, of motor and aural skills. On the contrary, controls did not show any co-activation effect.