Mozart Effect

The Mozart effect is the hypothesis that listening to music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart can temporarily raise scores on certain portions of an IQ test. The original 1993 study found only a short-lived improvement, lasting around fifteen minutes, in spatial reasoning tasks such as paper folding and maze solving among college students, but popular media exaggerated the finding into broader claims that listening to Mozart makes people, and especially children, smarter, fueling a commercial fad. Later meta-analyses have found little support for the effect, and researchers now attribute any brief cognitive improvement to increased arousal and mood rather than to Mozart's music specifically.