Psychiatry & Psychology

The Mozart Effect: Is it Real?

March 28, 2006 | By Tony Brown | Share, Save, and Bookmark | 7 Comments

Over the weekend, I traveled into the city to see the Mozart’s Don Giovanni, an opera based on the legend of Don Juan. I don’t get a chance to see much performance art, but since a friend with an extra ticket had invited me along for free, I decided that it would be a nice experience. Besides, if there were any truth at all to the Mozart Effect theory, what better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than raising my I.Q. score a few points?

The Mozart Effect is a popular notion that listening to classical music makes kids smarter. The theory inspired Georgia governor Zell Miller in 1998 to propose that $105,000 each year be set aside in the state budget to provide every native born Georgian child with classical music tape or CD. Of course the University of Wisconsin psychologist Frances H. Rauscher, and Gordon Shaw, a physicist at the University of California at Irvine, never claimed in their 1993 landmark paper that Mozart makes children smarter, rather they asserted that his music improved mental imagery and temporal ordering abilities. The subsequent increase in spatial reasoning scores on the Stanford-Binet IQ probably influenced the popular notion that the Mozart Effect is connected to intelligence. Since spatial ability includes spatial perception, spatial construction, spatial memory and spatial attention, one cannot measure it as a one-dimensional construct.

My mental rotation ability for instance, came in pretty handy on the day of the opera. I mentally rotated three-dimensional maps of the huge performance hall to find my seat, and performed multi-step manipulations of figural information at the snack bar during intermission. Still, after the opera I cannot claim that I felt any better prepared to become a geometry teacher, engineer, architect or city planner. I will say however that, uncharacteristically, I did not get lost on the way home.

So what do you think: Is the Mozart Effect real?

7 Comments/Trackbacks

You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Kevin
March 28, 2006 | Permalink

I recently posted a link to an article in Current Directions in Psychological Science re: the Mozart Effect. It can be viewed at:

http://tinyurl.com/owrv2

Kevin McGrew
http://www.intelligencetesting.blogspot.com

Anonymous
March 28, 2006 | Permalink

There does seem to be an effect at work.I know my daughter likes both Mozart and a CD called Music for Infants that has some very calming classical music. Most of the parents I know think in terms of “calming effect” rather than “Mozart effect”As far as making children smarter, that is a loaded question. Perhaps classical music creates the environment that fosters greater imprinting dexterity.

NeuroGuy
March 29, 2006 | Permalink

I doubt if listening to Mozart will make you smarter, but it’s not a big leap to assume that very specific kinds of brain functions could be enhanced by some kinds of music. Correlation between music and math has been noted in individuals who were prodigies in both.

J. Stephen Higgins
April 05, 2006 | Permalink

The mozart effect is mostly crap – the original researchers haven’t been very successful in replicating their results. This has been a notorious time hole for beginning graduate students looking for an effect.

Anonymous
April 06, 2006 | Permalink

Glanced at the book, bought it as it contained many references to Parkinsons Disease (my friend has had PD for many years). Harp music helps relieve the tremors caused by the meds he takes. It doesn’t work every time but when it does it is amazing!!!

Developing Intelligence
July 23, 2006 | Permalink

As I wrote a few months ago, in some ways the benefits of music on cognition are not as controversial as this discussion makes it seem. For example, six-year-old children who are given keyboard or voice lessons have shown a reliable 2 to 3 point increase in IQ scores compared to control groups who received other types of artistic lessons. Pre-schoolers with two years of music lessons scored better on spatial reasoning tests than those who took computer lessons for the same time. And as has been noted, as little as 10 minutes of exposure to Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major resulted in a temporary enhancement of spatial-temporal reasoning on the Stanford-Binet IQ test. Mozart has also been shown to allow some with Alzheimer’s disease to function more normally, to reduce the severity of epileptic seizures, and even to lessen the need for sedatives in surgery relative to no music or white noise

Some hold that the effect of such music is only to elevate arousal and mood, which then results in improved performance and well-being in a variety of situations. But if true, the Mozart effect is one of the few examples of an extremely rare phenomenon known as ‘far transfer,’ in which experience with one domain (music) can transfer benefits to a completely distinct domain (spatial reasoning).