The Mozart Effect

You may have heard the phrase Mozart effect, which refers to the idea that listen-

ing to Mozart can actually improve your child’s IQ. The idea came from an experi-

ment conducted on a small group of college students who were asked to listen to a

Mozart sonata. The psychologists found an improvement of spatial reasoning skills

(see Chapter 7). But this improvement lasted for only ten minutes!

When a product makes claims that Mozart will make your child smarter, surely you

hope that this improvement in IQ is going to last more than ten minutes! However,

the original study clearly indicates that this effect doesn’t last for any longer than

this: it’s temporary. And no, having your child listen to Mozart for a longer time

won’t increase his IQ for an extended period of time.

No reliable scientific studies show that listening to Mozart makes children any

smarter, for any length of time. In fact, many studies have failed to replicate the

so-called Mozart effect. One Harvard scientist examined the Mozart effect in 16

different studies with over 700 participants (that’s almost 20 times more participants

than in the original study, making the conclusions much more reliable). Yet none of

these studies provided any scientific evidence for the Mozart effect. This is impor-

tant to note, because when no one else is able to reproduce a scientific finding, the

original findings are likely to have been a fluke. The premise that listening to Mozart

will make your child smarter is simply false.