Listening to Music Enhances Spatial-Temporal Reasoning: Evidence for the "Mozart Effect"

Abstract

Does listening to music for brief periods temporarily enhance performance on spatial tasks? This question was made famous by the 1993 report in Nature by Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw, and Katherine Ky that college students' scores on spatial subtests of the Stanford-Binet IQ battery increased an equivalent of 8-9 IQ points for 10 to 15 minutes after listening to about ten minutes of the first movement (Allegro con spirito) of Mozart's Piano Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, K. 448.1 In contrast, performance on spatial tasks did not improve following ten minutes of sitting in silence or listening to a tape of relaxation instructions designed to lower blood pressure. The experiment was motivated by the trion model of the cortex, and the authors explained their result by that model: columns of neurons in the cortex involved in musical processing-with three levels of activation, hence the term trion--primed neurons used for spatial tasks.2 Dubbed the Effect, this finding led to a frenzy of commercial and media attention.3 The logic leaped from a laboratory result showing a transient boost in spatial scores after listening to Mozart to the conclusion that listening to Mozart could raise children's IQ.4 Music CD's for infants were marketed, and well-meaning politicians touted the benefits of classical music as an educational silver bullet-including then governor of Georgia, Zell Miller, who distributed CDs of classical music to all infants born in the state.5