The Mozart Effect
The Mozart effect is the hypothesis that listening to the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart may temporarily boost scores on one portion of an IQ test. Popular science versions of the hypothesis make the claim that "listening to Mozart makes you smarter" or that early childhood exposure to classical music has a beneficial effect on mental development.
The original study from 1993 reported a short-term (lasting about 15 minutes) improvement on the performance of certain kinds of mental tasks known as spatial reasoning, such as folding paper and solving mazes.
The results were highly exaggerated by the popular press and became "Mozart makes you smart", which was said to apply to children in particular (the original study included 36 college students).
These claims led to a commercial fad with Mozart CDs being sold to parents.
The U.S. state of Georgia even proposed a budget to provide every child with a CD of classical music. Around this time, the Baby Einstein franchise was being started and the second video in the series, Baby Mozart, was made with the Mozart Effect in mind.
A meta-analysis of studies that have replicated the original study shows that there is little evidence that listening to Mozart has any particular effect on spatial reasoning.
The author of the original study has stressed that listening to Mozart has no effect on general intelligence.
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