Mozart Effect

The Mozart effect is the hypothesis that listening to the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart can temporarily raise scores on one part of an IQ test, popularized in claims that listening to Mozart makes a person smarter or that early exposure to classical music benefits a child's mental development. The original 1993 study by Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw and Catherine Ky, involving 36 college students, reported a short improvement lasting about fifteen minutes on spatial reasoning tasks such as paper folding and maze solving. The popular press greatly exaggerated the finding into broader claims about general intelligence, especially for children, and a meta-analysis of later replication studies has found little evidence that listening to Mozart has any real effect on spatial reasoning, a conclusion the original study's own author has endorsed.