What do you think of this fact?
Play Mozart to your baby and it will grow up smarter. In the 1990s, that idea was everywhere. It all started with a study just one page long.
Ten minutes of Mozart
In 1993, psychologist Frances Rauscher and colleagues at the University of California, Irvine published a short study in Nature. According to Scientific American, 36 college students listened to 10 minutes of a Mozart sonata in D major, a relaxation recording or silence, and then solved spatial reasoning tasks. On a paper-folding task, the Mozart group reportedly gained about 8 to 9 spatial IQ points.
Notice what the study did not say. It tested college students, not babies. It measured one kind of spatial task, not general intelligence. And according to NPR and McGill University’s Office for Science and Society, the effect lasted only about 10 to 15 minutes.
From lab to law
None of that slowed the hype. In 1998, Georgia Governor Zell Miller gave free classical music CDs to every baby born in the state, NPR reports. Tennessee followed suit. Florida required day care centers to play symphonies, according to Scientific American. McGill also points out that Miller credited “Ode to Joy” to Mozart. It’s by Beethoven.
Then science caught up. In 1999, Christopher Chabris analyzed 16 studies and found an effect of only about 1.5 IQ points, limited to the paper-folding task, small enough that it could just be normal variation between two test sessions. A 2010 meta-analysis, the largest on the subject according to McGill, found no effect overall. Even Rauscher now calls it “really a myth”, according to Scientific American.
Bonus fact: A 2004 study found that Rauscher’s Mozart paper was cited 8.3 times more often in the top 50 US newspapers than the second most popular research paper, which Carl Sagan had co-written.
The music was never the problem. It just never came with an IQ upgrade.