teachers who play Mozart to their students in the hopes their test scores will improve. "And for a lot of students it's not going to work simply because Mozart is weird to them. They're not used to it. They don't like it, and so nobody performs well under stress."

coordinated or synchronized

Mozart effect’ (as the Press called it

quickly captivated the public imagination

This story began in 1993 when Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw and Katherine Ky published a brief paper in the prestigious journal Nature

. The report by Rauscher, Shaw and Ky suggested that listening to music actually caused the brain to perform better in spatial reasoning, at least for a few minutes.

Mozart Effect was born as the idea that listening to Mozart increases intelligence

the question is whether or not brief exposure to certain music can produce long term improvements in intelligence, either limited to spatial/temporal abilities or to more general intelligence, then the answer is no.

Mozart Effect requires only 10 minutes of exposure (not necessarily even attentive listening) to music.

music

College students were required to listen to ten minutes of Mozart's sonata for two pianos in D major, a relaxation tape, or silence.

original experiment was published in 1993

Mozart to test for improvements in memory and this idea thus became known as the "Mozart Effect".

scientists at the University of California at Irvine.

should be a measurable correlation between musically trained minds and their intelligence

brain = behavior,

music does have a impact on cognitive ability.

If brain activity can sound like music, might it be possible to begin to understand the neural activity by working in reverse and observing how the brain responds to music?

the experiments that compared listening to Mozart to silence, and which had not included listening to other compositions.

another attempt to demonstrate the Mozart Effect

unable to show that listening to the music of Mozart had any effect on spatial-reasoning performance. They conclude by stating: "...there is little evidence to support basing intellectual intervention on the existence of the Mozart effect."

monkeys listened to Mozart piano music for 15 minutes before they had to do a memory test. The researchers found that listening to Mozart music did NOT improve the monkeys' performance compared to when the monkeys listened to rhythms or white noise. They also found that listening to Mozart during the test impaired memory and while white noise during the test improved memory slightly.