The Famous Mozart Effect

The famous (or infamous) so-called “Mozart Effect” is the result of people taking some test results and supposing that they will apply universally.

In 1993, a researcher named Frances Rauscher at the University of California, Irvine, found that adolescents listening to Wolfgang Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D major performed better in reasoning tests than those listening to something else or sitting in a silent room. But what happened afterwards?

Babies Smarter than our Congressmen!

Typical of our human nature, lots of uninformed and over zealous educators and marketers started claiming that listening to Mozart would “make you smarter”. Once Georgia Governor even wanted to add to the state budget $105,000 a year to provide every child born in Georgia with a tape or CD of classical music.

He went so far as to say to the legislators of the state, "No one questions that listening to music at a very early age affects the spatial-temporal reasoning that underlies math and engineering and even chess." Then after playing some Beethoven to the same groups he asked, "Now, don't you feel smarter already?"

What he missed, of course, was that not one of the researchers ever said that listening to classical music, Mozart or Beethoven or any other composer, made you smarter. They said it could have an affect on spatial-temporal reasoning.

Mozart Effect Researcher Challenges Effects

A year after the study came out, Frances Rauscher published an article challenging the effects her study seemed to bear out and said:

Our results on the effects of listening to Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major K. 448 on spatial–temporal task performance have generated much interest but several misconceptions, many of which are reflected in attempts to replicate the research. The comments by Chabris and Steele et al. echo the most common of these: that listening to Mozart enhances intelligence. We made no such claim. The effect is limited to spatial–temporal tasks involving mental imagery and temporal ordering.

So what is spatial-temporal reasoning? It is the ability to think in patterns and pictures, and is crucial in math, in particular, in learning proportional reasoning. Spatial-temporal reasoning helps students, for instance, to visualize a problem at a higher level.  Einstein said that’s how he thought when he wrote down his equations.

How Effective is the Mozart Effect?

How effective is the “Mozart Effect”? It seems to vary with whom you talk to. But, there is some pretty clear evidence that certain types of sounds do indeed affect this ability to think in terms of space and time and to visualize more complex ideas.

Watch for a post coming up on a cognitive development program that has proven to do some remarkable things.