The Mozart effect was an experiment that was conducted on a small group of college students in 1993. In the experiment, they listened to Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major and were then asked to do a spatial reasoning task and an intelligence test. The results generated from the study were not very significant at all. Each of the participants only showed an improvement of 8-9 IQ points. The belief the experimenters had was that listening to Mozart would temporarily increase the brain's ability to complete spatial tasks. This experiment was eventually replicated, and the results did not fully back the results of the original study.
Although it was publicly stated that the Mozart Effect was proven to have a small effect, companies took this idea and ran with it. They would advertise CD's with the pretense that it would help boost their babies' intelligence. In contrast to this theory, a study found that listening to Schubert or a passage from a Stephen King novel worked just as good when it came to helping at spatial tasks. Brain arousal was proven to be the reason for improved spatial skills, which is why other forms of music or enrichment provide the same effects as listening to Mozart. No matter what form of enrichment was used to stimulate brain arousal in babies, the effects were shown to only last for a short amount of time.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20130107-can-mozart-boost-brainpower
Posts
Gabriel,
ReplyDeleteYour post about the Mozart effect was great and very interesting to read. It is such an interesting idea that people decided to test listing to the Sonata for two pianos and attempted to link it to higher IQ and Intelligence in children.