On a recent appearance on Inside Out Radio, educator and author Barbara Bullard said that “what goes in with music, comes out with music.” She was talking about using music as a technique to improve recall. While music is a proven memory aid, there is some research indicating that listening to some music can actually make you smarter, too.
What Is The Mozart Effect?
The idea of the Mozart Effect is simple: you actually increase your I.Q. just by listening to the music of Mozart. The principle was first noticed by Alfred A. Tomatis when he discovered that listening to Mozart’s music helped his patients improve communication skills, creativity and task performance. He christened the phenomenon the “Mozart Effect”.
In the early nineties, the concept hit critical mass with the publication of Don Campbell’s revolutionary book The Mozart Effect: Tapping the Power of Music to Heal the Body, Strengthen the Mind, and Unlock the Creative Spirit
In that 1993 study, a research team led by Frances Rauscher reported that a group of college students outperformed their peers on a test measuring a specific kind of spatial intelligence after listening to Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D, K. 448.
In the years since the initial publication of the findings, researchers have argued the value of the Mozart Effect, but a July, 2009 study again reaffirms that the Mozart Effect improves spatial intelligence and temporarily boosts problem solving skills.
2009 Study Of Mozart
The ‘Mozart effect’ occurs when performance on spatial cognitive tasks improves following exposure to Mozart. It is hypothesized that the Mozart effect arises because listening to complex music activates similar regions of the right cerebral hemisphere as are involved in spatial cognition. A counter-intuitive prediction of this hypothesis (and one that may explain at least some of the null results reported previously) is that Mozart should only improve spatial cognition in non-musicians, who process melodic information exclusively in the right hemisphere, but not in musicians, who process melodic information in both hemispheres. This hypothesis was tested by comparing performance of musicians and non-musicians on a mental rotation task before and after exposure to either Mozart or silence. It was found that performance on the mental rotation task improved only in non-musicians after listening to Mozart. Performance did not improve for non-musicians after exposure to silence, or for musicians after exposure to either Mozart or silence. These results support the hypothesis that the benefits of listening to Mozart arise because of activation of right hemispheric structures involved in spatial cognition.
Afshin Aheadi, Peter Dixon, and Scott Glover
Royal Holloway University of London
Psychology of Music 2009, doi:10.1177/0305735609336057
