Psychology Paper

Playing Mozart’s music to infants boosts their intelligence
Kenny Chhen
Psychology 15006
2 March 2015

We are living in an exciting time of exploration into the most mysterious and complex object known to man: the brain
.
People are always interested in ways on how to boost their IQ’s and their children’s IQ
.
One way that people have tried to increase their infants’ IQ is by playing
Mozart’s music
.
This is a commonly held belief that the
Mozart Effect began in the early 1990s with a study that linked higher scores on certain spatialtemporal tests from listening to a Mozart sonata . There is a common misconception that Mozart makes you smarter and most successful studies have failed to say that there are any long lasting effects
.
The Mozart effect gained widespread interest in potential benefits of listening to music and made popular by the publication of an article by: Rauscher, Shaw and Ky in 1993
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They reported superior spatial abilities for participants who listened to music composed by Mozart
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Although the effects only lasted 1015 minutes, long term exposure during infancy with the
Mozart effect could have long term impact
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This is excellent for infants because this is when the infants’ brain plasticity is at its highest
.
The first Mozart experiment came from the trion model of cerebral cortex (Leng & Shaw,
1991)
. In the model neural firing patterns occur during spatialtemporal tasks and musical cognition . Leng and Shaw speculated that listening to music might activate neurons prior to completing spatial related task thus enhancing spatial performance by exciting specific neurons in the cerebral cortex
.
Rauscher, Shaw and Ky (1993) supported this theoretical rationale by boosting 36 college students’ spatial intelligence scores from 8 to 9 after they listened to 10 minutes of Mozart’s sonata
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All 36 students engaged in 3 different 10 minute treatments:

Mozart’s music, a relaxation tape, and silence)
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After each treatment the participants answered spatial ability questions from the cognitive StanfordBinet intelligence test
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The Mozart sonata produced the highest but the improvements only lasted again 1015 minutes after listening to the music . In 1995, the three researchers approved these results by comparing 10 minutes of Mozart to a variety of other genres
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Some researchers argued that there is an increase in enhanced test performance but not an actual intellectual change
.
Steele, Bass, and Crook (1999) hypothesized music changed a person’s mood which determined how they did on an IQ test
.
The 3 researchers used a song by
Philip Glass which was addressed as “repetitive,” “obnoxious,” and “grating,” and a Mozart piece which was interpreted

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