"Does Listening to Mozart Increase the Intelligence of Babies?" Psychology Myths (Part 5 of 5)
Myth #5 You can increase the intelligence of babies by playing Mozart's Music These posts always start with a few samples of myth believers. In this case, it's 73% of psychology students, who were barely taking the introductory course, that were gullible enough to believe that Mozart's music affects intelligence (Taylor & Kowalski, 2003, p. 5). In addition, two surveys conducted by Bangerter & Heath (2004) found that over 80% of Americans were acquainted with the effect. History Once upon a time, in 1993 there was an article titled "Music and spatial task performance" in the journal "Nature." The article was about an experiment that looked at what happened after college students listened to a Mozart piano sonata for 10 minutes. The results were that the students displayed a short-term improvement in a spatial reasoning task (Rauscher, Shaw, KY, 1993). This article served as the basis for the Mozart Effect. (If you would like...