A new study suggests that a drug gives adults the opportunity to learn “perfect pitch” – defined as “the ability to identify or produce the pitch of a sound without a reference point” – long after the “critical period” for this capacity has passed in early childhood:
Valproate [a mood-stabilizing drug] was given to a group of healthy young men with no musical training. The men were then asked to perform a set of exercises for two weeks with the aim of improving their pitch while another control group was asked to perform the same exercises, but given a placebo.
According to the study, those subjects given valproate learned to identify pitch “significantly better than those taking the placebo.” [Researcher Takao] Hensch calls the results remarkable, telling NPR that until now there had been “no known reports of adults acquiring absolute pitch.” The implications of the study aren’t limited to learning how to sing beautifully: by altering brain plasticity, users of valproate could conceivably learn other skills normally picked up during the early critical period. Hensch picks out language learning as an obvious area of application for the drug.
In an interview, Hensch stresses the potential risks of his findings:
I should caution that critical periods have evolved for a reason, and it is a process that one probably would not want to tamper with carelessly. If we’ve shaped our identities through development, through a critical period, and have matched our brain to the environment in which we were raised, acquiring language, culture, identity, then if we were to erase that by reopening the critical period, we run quite a risk as well.
(Video: Ella Fitzgerald, who had perfect pitch, performing in 1957)
The Dish 