I remember hearing somewhere about some sort of “study” on classical music and intelligence. It seems that there may be some improvement in intelligence by having babies listen to classical music.
My grandmother is caring for an infant whose mother has died. She understandably wants to give this baby the best care and encouragment as possible. Last week, we were in a baby-products store, and she spotted some classical CDs that are intended for infants. (Which bear a striking resemblance to the classical CDs that I own which are intended for adults, I might add. The only difference seems to be a picture of a baby on the album cover and a two-dollar-higher price.) She grabbed a Beethoven and a Bach, saying that my mother had told her about the correlation between playing classical music for babies and higher IQs. I said I had also heard the story, but was unsure of the real science behind it.
My foggy brain insists that I once read an article quoting a neurologist who claimed that listening to classical music seemed to make faster/different neural connections. (Of course, there’s always the chance that saying it’s the music is a fundamental attributional error: it could just be that the kind of parents who play classical music for their babies are more contientious, and their babies recieve more overall intellectual stimulation.)
So, my first question is this: is there honestly anything to this? Has any serious research been done which accounts for the varying environmental/socio-economic factors which might affect such a study? (I’m not looking for articles which refer to it, but the actual research itself.) Were the researchers reputable?
Secondly, are there any instructions? My grandmother has placed a CD player next to the baby’s cradle, and plays the CDs on continuous loop opn low volume while the baby sleeps. My theory was that if the music itself had any affect on the brain, it would work equally well while the infant sleeps, because it’s not as if the kid is concentrating on it while awake. Hell, at her age, she can’t concentrate on anything.
Third, have any of you parents used this? How did you set it up? Did you play the music only while the baby was awake? Have you noticed anything which would lead you to believe that it had a positive affect on your child?
My understanding is that this is a misconception which derives from an experiment in which subjects are presented with either classical music, “repetitive music” which might be likened to techno, or silence, and are then given some task - mental rotation of objects, or list memorization, or nearly other menial task. The result was that the subjects who had been listening to classical music performed significantly better. The news spread uncontrollably, and eventuially resulted in this rumor.
Later studies showed that subjects who listened to classical music performed no better than subjects who listened to an “interesting story,” as opposed to the silence. The conclusion was that any sort of interesting task prepares you for an activity better than performing some non-interesting task, like sitting in silence.
Finally, subjects were given questions rating how much they liked the music, or the story, and then given the mental task. It was found that there was a correlation between the people who liked the music more than the story doing better after listening to the music, and people who liked the story more than the music doing better after listening to a story than the music.
To my tremendous disappointment, I can’t seem to find my notes on the topic. I might be able to provide you with names and dates for the above experiments.
There actually was a study on what was called the “Mozart Effect.” It is referenced about halfway down this page from the U Washington. The Pub Med link to the abstract of the Science article is here.
Oooops! I do not want Green Bean to Pit me, so I should note that no one has been able to reproduce the original results (which were not very spectacular to begin with).
The original experiment was Rauscher, et al, 1993.
The other experiment that I mentioned was Nantais and Schellenberg, 1999, and the story was by Stephen King.
A google will reveal many more studies, the majority of which seem to emphasize that there’s no correlation between Mozart and IQ. But if you must play music to your infant, I suppose Mozart couldn’t do much harm. Keep the volume low.
While I won’t endorse the claim that classical music will turn junior into a genius, I think it is safe to say that most psychologists subscribe to the view that stimulation is key to brain development, and that stimulation early on in life may be particularly important.
My memory is foggy (my parents were hippies; instead of absorbing the nurturing symphonies of Mozart, I spent my childhood in a smoky haze of Byrds and Jefferson Airplane records), but I recall an account of pitifully neglected children from Eastern Europe that recieved little or no stimulation, and as a result exhibited drastically reduced numbers (or densities) of dendritic spines on their brain cells. Maybe someone else remembers this study and can elaborate.
I linked to a Penn & Teller’s “Bullshit!” show site. One of the things they featured in an effort to debunk was the Mozart/babies thing that rjung summarized.
Agreed with Green Bean. She’s indoctrinating the child into a world of muzak, where nobody seems capable of coping with silence, and nobody truly listens to the world around them. Give the kid a break, and start saving for a piano, to get the real Mozart effect.
