Gordon Shaw, a retired University of California, Irvine physicist whose Irvine-based Music Intelligence Neural Development Institute attracted support from big-name technology executives, died at his Laguna Beach home last week.
Shaw, 72, died of kidney cancer, according to his family.
The Music Intelligence Neural Development Institute, or Mind Institute for short, seeks to help kids develop subconscious skills needed to excel at math.
The work behind Mind started more than 15 years ago when Shaw was looking at whether early music training would help a child’s spatial-temporal reasoning, or the ability to think in time and space.
A test on college students set off a media frenzy about how classical music could make babies smarter.
Shaw’s methods and software are used at schools in Santa Ana and elsewhere. His Mind Institute has attraced hefty donations from Broadcom Corp.’s Henry Samueli, Emulex Corp.’s Paul Folino and FileNet Corp. founder Ted Smith.
