Mozart+Makes+You+Smarter

“Classical music makes you smarter.” You’ve no doubt heard something along these lines at some point. You might have even heard that playing classical music, and specifically Mozart, to babies (born or unborn) will increase their intelligence. Is this true, and where did this idea even come from?
 * Mozart Makes You Smarter **
 * Introduction **

Let’s look first at who stands to benefit from this belief. The idea has most certainly been commercialized; one must only visit the online shop at [] to appreciate the money that stands to be made. The man who runs this site is also a prolific author. Don Campell’s books, mostly to do with music and spirituality, can be found at []. In 1997 he wrote //T// // he Mozart Effect: Tapping the Power of Music to Heal the Body, Strengthen the Mind, and Unlock the Creative Spirit //. The very next year, Georgia Governor Zell Miller proposed a budget item that would buy CD players and classical music CDs for his fellow Georgians: []. With the “Mozart Effect” theory pushing as far as government and state budgets, surely there must be something to it!
 * Who’s Pushing This Theory? **

The term “Mozart Effect” was coined (albeit in French) by Alfred Tomatis. Tomatis believed that many ailments were the result of errant hearing, meaning that while your ear is in proper physical shape, your brain is not correctly perceiving the audible stimuli. He developed a method of auditory recovery for rehabilitation for musicians, actors, and even students with learning disabilities and autism, making use of Mozart recordings. French actor Gerard Depardieu speaks highly of him on Youtube ([]), and a French organization carries on his work to this day ([]). Despite Tomatis’ use of Mozart listening to rehabilitate learning disabilities, it is believed that this is a coincidence—the modern interpretation of “The Mozart Effect” is that Tomatis simply coined the term (late in his career, in 1991), and did not produce the research that started the movement.
 * How It Started: **

The Mozart Effect’s breakout moment came a few years later, in 1993. Authors Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky submitted a letter to the editor of Nature, the world’s most-cited general science journal, who published it: []
 * Where it Picked Back Up **

In short, the researchers had taken three groups of college students (12 students per group), and had one group sit in silence, one sit with some relaxation music, and one sit with Mozart playing. After listening, each student took a test, and supposedly the ones who listened to Mozart did better.

The letter in Nature contained a key sentence that caught the imagination of the popular media: “Thus, the IQs of subjects participating in the music condition were 8-9 points above their IQ scores in the other two conditions.” The implications were significant and products that leverage the research were quickly made available by savvy businesspeople.

The primary driver of the original research, Gordon Shaw, went on to start a California nonprofit to research the matter further, the Music in Neural Development (MIND) Research Institute ( [] ), which is where I currently work. He also wrote a book exploring the original research as well as the results of the new research at MIND: []

Much is made of this publication, but it of course worth noting that while it was technically published in //Nature//, it was actually a letter to the editor. If you review the PDF, you will find that it doesn’t even fill a single page! It is worth keeping this in context, because it can be easy to get caught up in the research’s validity simply because it appeared in //Nature.// We also need to look no further than the original research to realize just how incorrectly the research has been interpreted. The main claim, the 8-9 point IQ boost, can easily be seen in context to mean something quite different. An IQ test was never actually even administered; rather, a portion of the Stanford-Binet intelligence scale (SAS) was administered. The portion of the test that was selected was the “abstract/spatial reasoning” section (a third of the overall test), which deals with questions like pattern recognition and paper folding. That score was then extrapolated out into a full IQ score for the sake of easy comparison, even though the IQ test consists of far more (and more varied) questions. It might have been more reasonable to simply assume that the “abstract/spatial reasoning” IQ test questions (and not the entire test) would have seen similar improvements. If we assume that a third of the IQ test would have seen similar improvements, then the point boost would have been in the 2-3 point range. The IQ test has a margin of error of 4-5 points! So, merely by analyzing the original letter, we can see that very little is actually being claimed. People who listen to Mozart might (just might!) be better at seeing patterns and folding papers for the next 15 minutes or so. When you consider the fact that only 12 students even took the test after listening to Mozart, and that the results are within the margin of error, we really need to look no further to know that “Mozart makes you smarter” is quite a stretch! Other researchers have tried to reproduce this test with little to no success. Much of the follow-up research can be found here: [|http://www1.appstate.edu/~kms/research/Steele.htm] Rauscher, one of the original authors who was hired by Shaw, reacted to the budget proposal to buy CD players and classical music, even stated that he would rather see money spent on music education: [] The German Government even commissioned a report to investigate the matter, and found that it could find no benefit to listening to classical music: [] Even Gordon Shaw, the primary author of the original research, states in his book that they had overestimated the types of problem-solving that saw improvement—only “spatial-temporal” problem-solving saw improvement, and even then for only 10-15 minutes after the listening session. By focusing on these kinds of problems exclusively, his further research was able to reproduce his earlier work; unfortunately, other researchers have not been able to reproduce either. The most telling behavior of Shaw’s, however, is that despite the promising results of Mozart listening, he ultimately found a way to produce far greater results with his MIND Research Institute: keyboard training. Simply teaching students how to play piano enhanced their abilities far more than simply listening. The MIND Research Institute, to this day, continues to market its music program for enhancing math skills and sees dramatic results not just in a lab setting, but in the field every day. So, does listening to Mozart make you smarter? Probably not. Does playing it make you smarter? Probably.
 * What It Really Means **