kid with headphones listening to music meme

Ten years after the theory became wildly popular, a team of researchers gathered the results from almost 40 studies conducted on the Mozart Effect, and found very little evidence that listening to classical music really does help performance of specific tasks. Firstly, college students were only tested on spatial intelligence, which required them to do tasks such as folding a paper or maze-solving, which is just one type of intelligence. The Mozart effect was later found to be misleading, and some now call it the Mozart myth. This led to the birth of development toys involving classical music for children, and advice to pregnant women to place headphones on their bellies for their babies to hear classical music so that they would, purportedly, be born smart. When it was reported, the media ran with it, proclaiming that ‘classical music helps kids become smarter’. In 1993, he reported that a group of college students increased their IQ levels as much as nine points as a result of listening to Mozart’s “Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major.” This led them to test the results of classical music on college students’ brains.

It was dubbed the Mozart Effect by Dr Gordon Shaw, who conducted research on the brain capacity for spatial reasoning.Īlong with his graduate student Xiodan Leng, he developed a model of the brain and used musical notes to represent brain activity, which resembled that of classical music notes when analysed.

The theory that listening to music, particularly classical music, makes people smarter, was developed in the early 1990s. Can music really help a person study better? Source: Shutterstock

Kid with headphones listening to music meme