Where did the “Mozart Effect” begin?
In 1993, psychologist Frances Rauscher published a study in the journal Nature (Nature. 1993 Oct 14;365(6447)) titled “Music and Spatial Task Performance.” The study involved 36 college students who listened to 10 minutes of a Mozart sonata, a relaxation track or silence, then were asked to complete several spatial reasoning tasks (such as determining what a folded paper that was cut would look like when it was unfolded). The students who had listened to Mozart showed significant improvement (about eight to nine spatial IQ points) in their performance of some of the tasks. From this study, the “Mozart Effect” was born, and media coverage touting the benefits of classical music, not just for college students, but for babies, children and fetuses, began. Is the “Mozart Effect” All Hype? A 1999 review of numerous subsequent studies found that none could verify the findings of the original 1993 study, according to a report by Stanford University, which attempted to explain why this study w
