Do Babies Exposed to Classical Music End Up Smarter?

A short paper published in Nature in 1993 unwittingly introduced the supposed Mozart effect to the masses. Psychologist Frances Rauscher's study involved 36 college kids who listened to either 10 minutes of a Mozart sonata in D-major, a relaxation track or silence before performing several spatial reasoning tasks. In one test—determining what a paper folded several times over and then cut might look like when unfolded—students who had listened to Mozart seemed to show significant improvement in their performance (by about eight to nine spatial IQ points).

In 1999 psychologist Christopher Chabris, now at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., performed a meta-analysis on 16 studies related to the Mozart effect to survey its overall effectiveness. "The effect is only one and a half IQ points, and it's only confined to this paper-folding task," Chabris says.

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My Comment:
It's funny that one small study could create a multi-million dollar industry. I wonder if the students did better listening to heavy metal, would we have had the same outcome. Baby Metallica... probably not.

Einstein Never Used Flash Cards is a good book that debunks myths like the Mozart effect and gives sound advice on how kids really learn.

"Play is to early childhood as gas is to a car," say Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff, explaining that reciting and memorizing will produce "trained seals" rather than creative thinkers.