Boosting Brain Power through the Arts

The Mozart Effect

There are some theories related to the Mozart Effect; one of them is that by listening to Mozart’s music, some kids can improve mental tasks known as “spatial temporal reasoning”. Another theory says that if you listen to Mozart’s music, you are going to be smarter, specialty if you listen to it when you are a baby.

Currently there are studies that try to prove the positive effect that this music has. A done in 1993 by Rauscher, Shaw and Ky, proves that the effect produced by this music is only temporal; the students that they used to do the research did not present effects extending beyond the 15-minute period and also the studies did not show an increase in IQ in general. They concluded that music has an effect in the spatial temporal reasoning, but not in a long-term talking.

The study mentioned before was made with in adults, but some scientists did the same study and instead of using adults, they used pre-school children aged 3-4 years. They gave keyboard music lessons for six months to those children. At the end of the training, all the children had the ability to play simple melodies. To prove if the music has an effect on the children, they did some tests to the children that did not receive music lessons and also to those ones who took music lessons and they compared the results. The performance of the kids who receive music lessons was more than 30% better than the kids that did not take the training.

The relaxation effect is another positive benefit that listening to this music can bring. Some women listen to this music when they are pregnant not only because they think that the baby is going to be smarter, but also because they feel more relaxed when listening to this kind of music.

I think that the effect that some kind of music can produce on us is real. For example, a song can make us feel energetic, happy, or maybe sad and depressed. So, I believe that Mozart’s music can relax our bodies and our minds, and when we are relaxed, we can think well and also show a better performance.

We should try to listen to this kind of music and see which effect it has on us; maybe we are going to discover a way to improve our skills.