Why is Mozart’s music so popular on musical instruments for children under five? Can listening to classical music raise our IQ quotients? One of the most persistent superstitions about the brain is that playing classical music to your baby will increase their intelligence. There is no scientific data to support this idea. But perhaps because it appeals to parents’ concerns about their children’s mental development – and because those who sell classical music products for children are always promoting it at every opportunity – the hypothesis has persisted on the scene. Let us tell you about the phenomenon called the Mozart Effect and its story.
- For the First Time, COVID-19 Spreads Like Wildfire in a Remote Pacific Country
- Norway achieves record profits through war
The term Mozart Effect was coined in 1991 by Dr. Alfred A. Tomatis (1920-2001), a French ear, nose and throat specialist. Tomatis claimed that listening to certain types of music helped to achieve certain goals. As a result, he claimed that listening to Mozart would solve depression and help those with learning difficulties to concentrate. In the following period, Dr. Frances Rauscher and Dr. Gordon Shaw, who were interested in the subject, examined the alleged phenomenon. They published their results in the journal Nature in 1993.
Based on a study conducted with a small group of university students (36 people), the article stated that classical music stimulates mental ability for a short period of time (about 15 minutes). According to the article, students were more successful at solving problems after listening to Mozart. The researchers summarized this effect as an increase of eight to nine notches on the Stanford-Binet IQ scale. This result did not attract much attention at first. It was only after Don Campbell’s 1997 book, The Mozart Effect, that the idea reached the masses. What Campbell did was nothing less than blend research with mystical elements to write a book that would become a bestseller and influence social policy.
When the Mozart Effect Became an Epidemic
Increasing your intelligence level quickly has never been easier. These results caught people’s attention. High school students started listening to Mozart while studying for their exams. In his next experiment, Rauscher suggested that Mozart’s music boosted mice’s ability to learn a maze. Scientists have also evaluated the music of other composers. They found that works by other “complex” musicians such as Schubert, Mendelssohn and Yanni also produced Mozart’s healing effect.
But the real boom came when it was rumored that listening to Mozart increased the intelligence of babies. Ambitious parents, eager to create young geniuses, went Mozart crazy. “Mozart for Babies” CDs shot to the top of the music charts. Mozart’s music began to be played in maternity wards.
But the interesting thing was that not a single experiment had ever been done to suggest that listening to Mozart’s music would improve a baby’s intelligence. The idea that classical music makes babies smarter has been repeated countless times in newspapers, magazines and books. It is still repeated. Of course, this is thanks to the marketing of relevant material by manufacturers. Today, there are still thousands of people who believe in this phenomenon, so that existing products are still available on the market.
The enormous interest in the Mozart Effect has led the scientific community to take a closer look at the phenomenon. In 1999, another study analyzed about 40 studies that had been dubbed the Mozart Effect. This analysis, titled “Mozart Effect-Shmozart Effect”, found that there was zero evidence that classical music improves intelligence.
Conclusion;
Although the studies invalidate the concept of the “Mozart effect”, let us remind you that the same is not true for music education. While playing classical music to your child probably won’t contribute to brain development, something else will. Children who learn to play a musical instrument have a more developed spatial reasoning ability than those who do not. In short, filling your home with music can indeed boost your child’s intelligence. But this requires becoming active producers, not just passive consumers. However, if you still enjoy classical music, there is no harm in letting your child listen to it, as long as you don’t expect a miraculous improvement.
