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If you were to walk across a typical university campus, you would most likely see many students with little white iPod earphones, listening to music. It is nearly impossible to ride public transportation without seeing someone listening to their portable music device. Just about everywhere you go, people listening to music. Music has found its role in just about every aspect of modern life. From television programming to shopping establishments, music has the potential to influence our moods and behaviors (Bruner 94).

Flooding our environment with tunes everywhere, music has the potential to influence our intellectual development. Can particular listening habits increase our intelligence? This question was made famous by a 1993 article in Nature magazine titled “Music and Spatial Task Performance” by university professors Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw, and Katherine Ky. They presented research results that suggest that, after listening to Mozart, college students increased their scores on spatial sub-tests in the Stanford-Binet IQ test (611). The spatial sub-tests measure a person’s ability to reason and mentally manipulate shapes and figures. In their research, students listened to about ten minutes of Mozart’s Piano Sonata, and subsequently scored eight to nine IQ points higher on spatial tests taken within ten minutes of music listening. Students did not improve in IQ tests taken later than fifteen minutes after listening to Mozart, nor they did they improve their IQ tests after sitting in silence or listening to relaxation instructions (Hetland 105).

As part of their paper, the Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky proposed that listening to classical music causes a particular neuron firing pattern in the brain. This firing pattern is similar to the firing pattern that occurs with spatial reasoning. One of the authors, Gordon Shaw, then argued that listening to Mozart has the effect of warming up the neurons used in spatial reasoning (Boettcher, Hahn, and Shaw 55). Study participants scored higher on the IQ tests because of the neuron warming.

This proposed consequential model has been dubbed the “Mozart Effect,” and has received a fair amount of media attention. Chip Heath, an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior, has studied the media coverage of the “Mozart Effect.” Heath hypothesized that interest in the Mozart Effect grew in response to anxiety about children’s education (Bangerter and Heath 614). Heath’s studies found that states with the most troubled education systems gave the most media attention to the Mozart Effect (615). Heath concludes that the public gave unwarranted attention to the Mozart Effect because they were looking for a solution to their education problems (616).

People looking to find a solution to improve intelligence rallied around the Mozart Effect. Their conceptions about the Mozart Effect leaped from a laboratory result showing a temporary increase in spatial scores to the conclusion and proof that listening to Mozart would increase children’s IQ scores. Music distributors began marketing classical music CDs for children, and politicians began tauting classical music as a solution to educational woes (Hetland 105). Even the governor of Georgia, Zell Miller, distributed classical music CDs to all infants born in the state (“Classical CDs”).

While the public focused more and more on the Mozart Effect as the silver bullet for their problems, cognitive psychologists and sciences were skeptical. The proposed reasons for the effect contradicted popular and prevailing cognitive views, namely modularity and cognitive transfer (Hetland 105). These well accepted views theorize that the mind is comprised of relatively separate units of particular types of information, and that it is difficult to transfer the learning of one type of information to another (Salomon and Perkins 113). While it is possible to learn musical rhythms and melodies, the principles of modularity and cognitive transfer contradict the theory that music “learning” transfers to other cognitive ability.

Theories about the Mozart Effect are tested through the scientific method. The scientific method is a way of doing scientific research that says that a particular experiment should be repeatable to have merit. If listening to music conclusively increases spatial memory, then the original 1993 study by Rauscher and colleagues should be able to be replicated with the same results. However, the many attempts to replicate the original study have produced varied results, with some scientists claiming complete failure to confirm the results from the original study (Steele, Brown, and Stoecker 843). Other scientists have conducted further studies, which have yet to yield concrete evidence for the Mozart Effect.

Currently, the results of some of the the studies seem to support a theory that music listening produces an optimal level of adrenalin in the brain, and thus increases mental performance immediately after such cognitive arousal. This theory is supported by an experiment that showed that spatial memory was temporarily increased in subjects who listened to a preferred Stephen King horror story in the same degree that it was increased in subjects who listened to Mozart (Nantais and Schellenberg 372). The experiment suggests that in both cases the brain was aroused by adrenalin and was thus able to increase spatial memory (Hetland 107).

In the experiments regarding the Mozart Effect, scientists have not yet found any evidence that listening to music has any long term effect on IQ. The strongest evidence relating music listening to IQ has shown that it only increased spatial cognitive ability for several minutes, and only in college students. According to Heath’s survey of studies, there have never been any study groups consisting of elementary students, high school students, or infants (Bangerter and Heath 618).

Marginal scientific results have provoked many in the general public to make unreasonable claims that classical music listening will increase intelligence. For example, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel refers to “numerous studies on the Mozart Effect and how it helps … even infants increase mental performance” (Bangerter and Heath 617). According to Heath, not only are the claims unsubstantiated, but there have not even been any studies involving infants (618).

While there may be personal or limited effects of music on some types of intelligence, the scientific community continues to find only marginal relationships between music and intelligence. Notwithstanding the limited correlations behind the Mozart Effect, the public has adopted the idea that classical music can increase intelligence, because of their desperation to find a solution to their troubling educational problems.

Works Cited
Bangerter, Adrian and Chip Heath.”The Mozart Effect: Tracking the Evolution of a Scientific Legend.” British Journal of Social Psychology 43 (2004): 605-623.

Boettcher, Wendy S., Sabrina S. Hahn, and Gordon L. Shaw. “Mathematics and Music: A Search for Insight into Higher Brain Function.” Leonardo Music Journal 4 (1994): 53-58.

Bruner II, Gordon C. “Music, Mood, and Marketing.” Journal of Marketing Oct. 1990: 94-104.

“Classical CDs will make babies smarter, Georgia governor says.” The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 18 Jan. 1998. FindArticles.com. 20 Apr. 2007. .

Hetland, Lois. “Listening to Music Enhances Spatial-Temporal Reasoning: Evidence for the ‘Mozart Effect’.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 34 (Fall/Winter 2000): 105-148.

Nantais, Kristin M., and E. Glenn Schellenberg. “The Mozart Effect: An Artifact of Preference.” Psychological Science 10 (1999): 370-373.

Rauscher, Frances, Gordon Shaw, and Katherine Ky. “Music and Spatial Task Performance.” Nature 365 (Oct-Dec 1993): 611.

Salomon, Gavriel, and David N. Perkins. “Rocky Roads to Transfer: Rethinking Mechanisms of a Neglected Phenomenon.” Educational Psychologist 24 (1989): 113-142.

Steele, Kenneth M., Joshua D. Brown, and Jaimily A. Stoecker. “Failure to Confirm the Rauscher and Shaw Description of Recovery of the Mozart Effect.” Perceptual and Motor Skills 88 (1999): 843-848.

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