Mozart Effect: Mozart Doesn’t Make You Clever
Passively listening to Mozart — or indeed any other music you enjoy — does not make you smarter.
But more studies should be done to find out whether music lessons could raise your child’s IQ in the long term, concludes a report analysing all the scientific literature on music and intelligence, which was published last week by the German research ministry.
The interest in this scientific area was first sparked by the controversial 1993 Nature report in which psychologist Frances Rauscher and her colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, claimed that people perform better on spatial tasks — such as recognizing patterns, or folding paper — after listening to Mozart for 10 minutes.
The ‘Mozart effect’ remained a marketing tool for the music industry, and some private schools, long after a torrent of additional studies started to cast doubt on the finding. In the wild commercial flurry, which often involved over-interpretation of available data, the issues of listening to music and actively practicing music were frequently mixed up.
“We went through all of the literature to find out which questions were still open,” says lead author Ralph Schumacher, a piano-playing philosopher at the Humboldt University in Berlin.
The report pronounced Rauscher’s ‘Mozart effect’ dead.
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News article on BioEd Online
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