An Ode to Joy: Listening to Music May Not Make Children Smarter But it Will Make Them Dance

By Rebecca L. Green
Issue 93, March/April 1999

"Mozart makes you smart!" Such promises, prompted by a 1995 study by Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw, and Katherine Ky that suggested that students who had listened to classical music performed better on intelligence tests, 1 sent parents scrambling to stock up on CDs of Mozart's music. These parents probably were hopeful that listening to one genius would help them create another of their own. But in their rush to embrace the intellectualizing power of music, few people realized that the so-called "Mozart Effect" lasts only for a about ten minutes! In a more recent study, preschool children who took piano lessons performed better on tests of abstract reasoning. But this advantage typically lasted all of one day. 2

So before you start buying classical CDs or sign up your child for a full complement of piano lessons, it's worth taking a closer look at what the newest research on music and mental development really shows. There's no doubt that learning to appreciate and play music enriches life enormously. But will it really make your child the next Einstein or Oppenheimer?

The Music-Mind Connection
The latest research into the connection between music and childhood mental development is based on complex neurological theories about the structure of the cortex. After discovering a link between music and the pattern of neurons fired in the cortex, Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky hypothesized that music can "enhance the cortex's ability to accomplish pattern development, thus improving other higher brain functions." Describing music as a "pre-language," they suggest that the response of the cortex to music could be the Rosetta stone of neurobiology, the code to unlocking many still-mysterious secrets of brain activity.

Of course, no one is claiming that music is an all-purpose stimulant to the brain. Only certain kinds of thinking seem to be affected directly by music: specifically, spatial-temporal reasoning. This skill involves manipulating images over a series of steps. For example, in one task used by Rauscher et al. in their study, subjects were shown a series of folds and cuts in a piece of paper and asked to choose which paper snowflake would be the result.

While this kind of reasoning is important in some areas of mathematics, don't expect that listening to music will help your child remember her multiplication tables. In none of the recent studies did music help to improve memory. In another study that tried to replicate the Rauscher et al. findings, subjects heard a series of digits and were asked to repeat them, backwards. 3 Listening to Mozart first was of no use in this task either.