The Origins of the Mozart effect

From Research Methods in Psychology (pgs. 18-19):

Not too long ago there was a widely publicized phenomenon called the "Mozart effect." Headlines such as "Classical Music Good for Babies' Brains" were common at the time. These headlines caught people's attention, especially the attention of new parents. Media reports indicated that parents were playing classical music to infants in the hope of raising their children's intelligence. One million new mothers were given a free CD called "Smart Symphonies" along with free infant formula. Clearly the distributors and many new parents were persuaded that the Mozart effect was real.

The idea that listening to music might raise the intelligence scores of newborns is an intriguing idea. When you encounter intriguing ideas in the media such as this one, a good first step is to go to the original source in which the research was reported. In this case the original article was reported in a respectable journal, Nature. Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky (1993) described an experiment in which a single group of college students listened to a 10-minute Mozart piece, sat in silence for 10 minutes, or listened to relaxation instructions for 10 minutes before taking a spatial reasoning test. Performance on the test was better after listening to Mozart than in the other two conditions, but the effect disappeared after an additional 10- to 15-minute period.

The findings reported in the original source may be judged as solid, but the extrapolations of these findings are very shaky. A million women were being encouraged to play "smart symphonies" for their infants on the basis of an effect demonstrated on a very specific type of reasoning test with college students and the effect lasted 15 minutes at the most! Although some studies with children were done, the ambiguous results of all the research studies indicate that something had been lost in the "translation" (by the media) from the original research reports to the widespread application of the Mozart effect. People who are skeptical enough to ask questions when they hear or read reports of research in the media and knowledgeable enough to read research in the original sources are less likely to be misinformed.