Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Does Mozart make you smarter?

Parents have believed this myth for years. They have been buying Mozart cds, nursery schools have been playing it for their charges, and even tv shows have incorporated classical music as well. They're convinced that immersing their babies in classical music will help make them more intelligent.
A small research project conducted in 1993 helped start this myth. The results of this experiment were that students who listened to Mozart for 10 minutes scored higher on the SATs than their peers. However, the tasks on the SAT were spatial reasoning tasks. The study showed that listening to Mozart may induce a short-term improvement in spatial reasoning, but people interpreted those results as an increase in general IQ.
Even though no study has proven that IQ increases by listening to Mozart, people continue to buy into this myth. They want an easy way to make their children smarter. Rather than sitting down and perhaps helping them learn, they can just stick a Mozart CD in and let it do the work for them. This myth has been breeding a generation of lazy parents, and I can't see this epidemic getting any better.

1 comment:

  1. Hi Kelly!
    It's so funny to see that there were so many studies about the mozart effect and there is still no proof it works. I wish it did though, maybe I would enjoy doing school work more!!

    ReplyDelete