IS THAT KID GETTING SMARTER?: Scientists say that despite the claims on the CDs, simply listening to classical music does not make children smarter.
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The phrase "Mozart Effect" conjures an image of a pregnant woman who, sporting headphones over her belly, is convinced that playing classical music to her unborn child will improve the tyke's intelligence. But is there science to back up this idea, which has spawned a cottage industry of books, CDs and videos?
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).
Rauscher—whose work, unlike most scientists, is sometimes cited on the liner notes of CDs—remains puzzled as to how this narrow effect of classical music extended from a paper-folding task to general intelligence and from college students to children (and fetuses). "I think parents are very desperate to give their own children every single enhancement that they can," she surmises.
In addition to a flood of commercial products in the wake of the finding, in 1998 then-Georgia governor Zell Miller mandated that mothers of newborns in the state be given classical music CDs. And in Florida, day care centers were required to pipe symphonies through their sound systems.
A 2004 Stanford study tracked the media's coverage of Rauscher's study relative to other studies published in Nature around the same period. In the U.S.'s top 50 newspapers, her paper, titled "Musical and Spatial Task Performance," was cited 8.3 times more often than the second-most popular paper (co-authored by famed astronomer Carl Sagan).
"It seems to be a circumscribed manifestation of a widespread, older belief that has been labeled 'infant determinism,' the idea that a critical period early in development has irreversible consequences for the rest of a child's life," the researchers wrote in their analysis. "It is also anchored in older beliefs in the beneficial powers of music."
Some still argue for such musical powers. "Music has a tremendous organizing quality to the brain," notes Don Campbell, a classical musician who has written more than 20 books on music, health and education, including The Mozart Effect® and The Mozart Effect® for Children. Referencing French physician Alfred Tomatis's work in music therapy on children with dyslexia, attention-deficit disorders and autism in the mid-20th century, he believes music that's not highly emotional or overly rhythmic has a multilayered influence on the individual, from modulating mood to alleviating stress. "I know it improves our ability to be intelligent," he adds.
But 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. He notes that the improvement could simply be a result of the natural variability a person experiences between two test sittings.
Earlier this year, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research in Germany published a second review study from a cross-disciplinary team of musically inclined scientists who declared the phenomenon nonexistent. "I would simply say that there is no compelling evidence that children who listen to classical music are going to have any improvement in cognitive abilities," adds Rauscher, now an associate professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh. "It's really a myth, in my humble opinion."
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8 Comments
Add CommentI don't think it has anything to do with Mozart. I think it has to do with exposing a developing brain to non-noise patterns that encourage hook-ups that are successful in processing the non-noise problems encountered in later life.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOf course listening to Mozart or other high-quality music will help a developing brain (fetus or college student), although the size of the effect would be debatable. Yes, this is a non-scientific comment. But I am against the anti-music backlash. It has been shown that playing classical music out loud keeps hoodlums away from buildings, they hate the orderliness of the classics. So, isn't the reverse true? Can we not create a sense of beauty and order that enhances life? I think so - science will need to learn how to measure it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy last child was one of Zell Miller's experimental children. She received the Build Your Baby's Brain CD at birth, and I played it a lot. It was relaxing for both of us. As a mother of four, I'll take any form of legal relaxation I can get! Look, I don't know all the dynamics that go into birth order, or any of that, but I will tell you-- she is the "smartest" test-wise of all of them. She has been "labelled" highly gifted and goes to the toughest gifted magnet elementary school in Virginia. She gets Straight As there. I was baffled at first- what did I do differently? All four of my daughters were "labeled" gifted to some extent. But this one blows them all away-- she is "highly gifted" and is working on analogies not unlike those on my graduate school admission tests. What was the difference? I was asked. All I could think was those CDs. All the girls were breastfed, all talked to. (Her sister suffered through my beginning violin lessons while in the womb.-- she's now a cellist. Hmmm
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisplay the baby some math rock! example: cinemechanica and hella trust me it will make them happy. classical music makes smug babies
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI agree with the article and the comments that followed it. After two kids who were exposed to a variety of music during their "formative" years, I know that any kind of music from classical to rock music all play a role in development.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI feel that with so much background noise in our world that just about "any kind of background-music" would be preferred to listening to the clutter of everything else around us. Yes, even that humdrum Muzak is better than listening to the sounds of pencils being sharpened and food being eaten.
However, thrash, speed or death metal can wait until they're old enough to choose these specifically to drive the parents crazy!
Not that's there's anything wrong with those types of music, I'm just saying . . . Let's not go completely nuts or anything!
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Edited by musicbylen at 03/20/2008 2:40 PM
I personally like classical music, as well as classic rock and rap. My kids listen to some Beethoven and Tchaikovsky as well as Bon Jovi, ACDC, DMX, Nas, Snoop Doggy Dogg (something about his voice seems to soothe my kids), Eryka Badu, Mary J Blige, Alicia Keyes, etc. My babies seem to like it all when I match it to their mood... Slow boring stuff for when they are tired to exciting guitars and kick it beats when they are hyper.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSleep Bug generates ambient sounds and gives you the possibility to add sound effects.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is a classical scene there with classical music and different sound effects like violins, cello, drums and solo violin. My 2 year old son loves this and you should try it too.
With 19 different scenes you will love this app. Dream yourself away to the beach, on a train, childhoods music box, jungle, forest, zen garder, weather and many more.
Hey there is even a horror scene if thats your thing :)
Look for sleep bug in app store or windows phone marked.
www.sleepbug.net
The late professor Tomatis himself made a clear distinction between the "Mozart effect" and the "Tomatis effect". Tomatis used Mozart music because over the years he tried all sorts of musics and came to the conclusion that Mozart worked the best with his therapy, by far. I note that none of that information made it to this article and it is sad that Scientific American did not do a more thorough research on the subject. As it appears that Mozart music has positive effects on the brain and the psyche, these effect are not permanently modifying the listening pattern itself. The "Tomatis effect" is a serious training that exercises the tiny muscles of the middle ear, using a special device (the Electronic Ear) with filters and a process known as the "switch effect" or "gating", by which the tiny muscles inside the middle ear alternatively and randomly contract and relax, and as they become stronger and more flexible, are better able to activate the mechanism that controls the tension of the ear drums. Many of us live in environments bombarded with all sorts of sounds and if we lose or have never acquired the ability to filter out the not-so-important sounds in order to be able to focus on the important ones, we become stressed, tired and confused... Only imagine not being able to distinguish (or locate) the sound of a car as you are about to cross the street... This is a very small description of the Tomatis effect, but it is worth researching it. There are unfortunately not many therapy centers in the US that use this technology; one of the reasons, I think, being that the Tomatis heirs have tried to make it a lucrative business, and their course and equipment are very expensive. There is therefore a lot to do to help promote the work of Tomatis and make the treatment more affordable....
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