Mozart effect

The Mozart effect is the theory that listening to the music of Mozart may temporarily boost scores on one portion of an IQ test. Popular science versions of the theory make the claim that "listening to Mozart makes you smarter" or that early childhood exposure to classical music has a beneficial effect on mental development.[1]

The original study from 1993 reported a short-term (lasting about 15 minutes) improvement on the performance of certain kinds of mental tasks known as spatial reasoning,[2][3] such as folding paper and solving mazes.[4] The results were highly exaggerated by the popular press and became "Mozart makes you smart",[1] which was said to apply to children in particular (the original study included 36 college students).[1] These claims led to a commercial fad with Mozart CDs being sold to parents.[5] The U.S. state of Georgia even proposed a budget to provide every child with a CD of classical music.[1]

A meta-analysis of studies that have replicated the original study shows that there is little evidence that listening to Mozart has any particular effect on spatial reasoning.[5] The author of the original study has stressed that listening to Mozart has no effect on general intelligence.[4]

  1. ^ a b c d "'Mozart Effect' Was Just What We Wanted To Hear". NPR.org. Retrieved 2020-11-29.
  2. ^ Rauscher, Frances H.; Shaw, Gordon L.; Ky, Catherine N. (1993). "Music and spatial task performance". Nature. 365 (6447): 611. Bibcode:1993Natur.365..611R. doi:10.1038/365611a0. PMID 8413624. S2CID 1385692.
  3. ^ William Pryse-Phillips (2003). Companion to Clinical Neurology. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-515938-1., p. 611 defines the term as "Slight and transient improvement in spational[sic] reasoning skills detected in normal subjects as a result of exposure to the music of Mozart, specifically his sonata for two pianos (K448)."
  4. ^ a b Jenkins, J S (April 2001). "The Mozart Effect". Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. 94 (4): 170–172. doi:10.1177/014107680109400404. ISSN 0141-0768. PMC 1281386. PMID 11317617.
  5. ^ a b Pietschnig, Jakob; Voracek, Martin; Formann, Anton K. (2010-05-01). "Mozart effect–Shmozart effect: A meta-analysis". Intelligence. 38 (3): 314–323. doi:10.1016/j.intell.2010.03.001. ISSN 0160-2896.