ABSTRACT

Several decades of neuroscience and psychology research have deepened the knowledge base surrounding the old aphorism that “music makes you smarter.” This notion particularly gained a surge in popularity following the results of a study by Rauscher and collaborators (Rauscher, Shaw, & Ky, 1993) showing that participants who listened to a Mozart sonata (K. 448) for 10 minutes performed better on visuospatial tasks than participants who listened to relaxation instructions or silence during the same amount of time. The effect, however, was shown to be only temporary (dissipating after 15 minutes), and follow-up attempts to replicate this initial finding were met with mixed results. A recent meta-analysis conducted on 39 studies (a combined total of 3109 participants) found evidence for a small “Mozart effect,” but similar in size to the effect of listening to other pieces of music or nonmusical stimuli, and at least partially attributed to the arousing nature of the auditory stimulus (Pietschnig, Voracek, & Formann, 2010).