"Picture music history in the shape of the human body, and then we can argue about who is what," classical-music writer Mark Swed wrote back in 2000. "I would make Mozart the heart; the ever pushy Beethoven, the hands; Wagner, the mouth telling everyone what to think (or maybe the genitals); and John Cage would be the left foot placed far forward, ahead of everyone else and poised to trip the whole contraption. You may have other ideas. But would anyone deny that Bach is the brain?"

The Santa Fe Institute and the Santa Fe Symphony would probably agree with that analysis, given the two have teamed up to present the music-education program and concerts Bach and the Brain. A public concert takes place at 4 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 30, at The Lensic Performing Arts Center on San Francisco Street, but the educational thrust zeroes in on two concerts for public-school fourth-graders at 9:30 and 11:30 a.m. Oct. 31, also at the Lensic. At least 1,000 students are expected to attend those two concerts.

Those school events will include symphony conductor Steven Smith's comments on the Bach pieces, scientific demonstrations woven throughout the concert, and music-and-brain correlative commentary by Chris Wood, vice president of administration at the Santa Fe Institute.

"The association with Bach is purely my suggestion," said Wood, a neuroscientist, by phone last week. "I'm interested in obscure miracles in the brain and how musical instruments produce sound in the air and how sound gets transduced by air into information that goes into our nervous system. ... There is a wealth of information about how the brain does process sound and how music can be informative.

"We could be doing this with any repertoire," he stressed. "It doesn't require Bach." Still, Wood acknowledged it would be tough to pull it off with heavy-metal music.

The institute prepared resource materials for teachers to utilize in their classrooms in the week leading up to the school concert. These workshop-driven plans encourage children to make longitudinal waves using Slinkys and then graph out the sound waves. The institute also provides slide whistles to the fourth-graders so they can demonstrate how sounds are made. New vocabulary words, including condensation, wavelength and rarefaction, are part of the lesson plan.

Wood made it clear that this effort is not a reworking of the once popular Mozart Effect. That theory suggested that listening to Mozart's music could lead to a short-term improvement in the performance of mental tasks known as spatial-temporal reasoning — or, in shorthand, listen to Mozart and you'll get smarter.

"That theory has largely been discounted by subsequent research," Wood said of the Mozart Effect. "On the other hand, since the days when that effect was initially hailed, the plasticity of the brain has been demonstrated far more extensively and ... the influence of activity in general of all sorts in developing the brain in infants and children — and even activity-dependent adults — is absolutely clear."

The concert will start with a solo violin and slowly build. Included in the program will be works by other composers that were based on the original Bach pieces as well as transcriptions of works for instruments other than those for whom the music was originally designed.

This is the third in a series of "Voyages of Discovery" collaborations between the two nonprofits that seek to explore the relationship between music and thinking. Last October, the two teamed up with José Francisco Salgado of Chicago's Adler Planetarium for the concert The Planets, focusing on British composer Gustav Holst's seven-movement The Planets (Opus 32).

Sunday afternoon's public concert will be more in-depth than the school shows. It's subtitled Music and the Mind, and tickets run from $20 to $70. Call 988-1234.