The immediate effect of the Mozart effect

Let’s put everything on the table like in a crime scene.

We have Nature, one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world, that suggests that by listening to only ten minutes of Mozart, people can increase their score in a subset of an intelligence test.

What the original study reported

But the original study tells more. Authors extrapolated the scores of the paper cutting and folding task and estimated how much the spatial IQ improved in the music condition compared to the relaxation condition and the silence condition. The music of Mozart boosted their spatial IQ by 8 points. Eight points! The IQ of participants increased from 110-111 in the silence and relaxing condition to an astonishing IQ of 118 in the music condition!

It didn’t matter that the original paper also reported cautionary notes about the result: that the effect was short in time (since it lasted 10-15 minutes) and that authors themselves acknowledged that it needed to be tested in other conditions, for example with other types of music.

That result was sufficient to originate one of the contemporary myths of psychology: the Mozart effect.

Reactions to the study

The scientific community

The general public

A present phenomenon

Appeal to child-rearing

Contrary to this quote, up to 2001, there has been no scientific study of the Mozart effect on elementary students, nor on high school students and not even on infants.

References

• Bangerter, A., & Heath, C. (2004). The Mozart effect: Tracking the evolution of a scientific legend. British Journal of Social Psychology, 43(4), 605-623.
• Rauscher, F. H., Shaw, G. L., & Ky, C. N. (1993). Music and spatial task performance. Nature, 365(6447), 611-611.