Echoing Mozart: Discovering a Link between the Brain and Music

When Gordon Shaw and Frances Rauscher published the results of their study on the relationship between music and spatial task performance in 1993, the "Mozart effect" became a popular term. It referred to the study's findings that ten minutes of listening to Mozart can boost one's spatial-temporal intelligence.

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But why Mozart? According to Marion Diamond, who describes the inception of Shaw's hypothesis in her book, Magic Trees of the Mind, the idea began when Shaw attended a lecture on how the brain transmits neural messages. This lecture led Shaw to formulate a theory of how neural impulses are organized into patterns by the cerebral cortex. Shaw's theory took the form of a long and complex mathematical model which for many of us, Diamond explains, "needs a major English translation into something like this: The neurons in the brain have certain natural firing patterns that act as an internal neural language. These patterns can be mapped and also altered through learning and experience."

The connection between this mathematical model and Mozart, however circuitous and intuitive, was made, says Diamond, after a "wizard of computer music...gave the mathematic equations a 'voice' and a 'face.'" And their voice seemed to echo Mozart.

On a computer monitor, the patterns look like brightly colored strips of Native American beadwork with geometric patterns that continually shift and change. And they sound a bit like Mozart. Because the patterns are spatial-temporal (they change in space over time), Shaw made the breathtaking intuitive leap that listening to Mozart might stimulate a person's spatial-temporal reasoning -- the cerebral function lurking beneath our ability to mentally rotate and manipulate objects in space. (Diamond 1998)
The "Mozart Effect" Study

At the University of California, Irvine, Shaw (a particle physicist and researcher at the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory) and his colleague, Rauscher (currently an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin - Oshkosh in cognitive psychology), gave a group of college students three sets of standard IQ spatial reasoning tasks. Each of these tasks was preceded by one of three ten-minute-long 'listening' conditions. One involved listening to a Mozart sonata for two pianos; another entailed listening to a relaxation tape; and the last consisted of sitting through ten minutes of silence. The results demonstrated that listening to Mozart gave individuals a distinct advantage in terms of spatial task performance. As Shaw noted in a 1993 Nature article, students performed better "on the abstract/spatial reasoning tests after listening to Mozart than after listening to either the relaxation tape or to nothing...."

Although the music condition significantly differed from the silence and the relaxation conditions, Shaw and his colleague were careful to qualify the study's results. Listening to Mozart's piano sonata in D major (K488) did, in fact, raise spatial reasoning test scores, but the effects were short-lived. Shaw made this temporary characteristic of the Mozart effect clear: "The enhancing effect of the music condition is temporal, and does not extend beyond the 10-15 minute period during which subjects were engaged in each spatial task."

The authors cited several areas calling for further research. Could the Mozart effect be optimized by varying the amount of listening time? Could other intelligence measures such as short-term memory, verbal reasoning, and quantitative reasoning also be enhanced by listening to Mozart? What effects would other kinds of music have on IQ performance? While the answers to these questions were unclear, the authors hypothesized that repetitive music, or music lacking in complexity, would fail to enhance performance. They believed that the complexity, and perhaps the mathematical precision of Mozart's music was responsible for its enhancing effect.

Shaw's summative statement, that "there are correlational, historical, and anecdotal relationships between music cognition and cognitions pertaining to abstract operations such as mathematical or spatial reasoning," was a sound and well-grounded observation. But once seized by the media, it was eventually transformed, like gossip, into a looser, less sound claim: that listening to Mozart can make one smarter. Beyond Shaw and Rauscher's first study, several others have further examined music's influence on the brain.