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This podcast covers the fascinating world of psychological science through discussing the research behind popular myths related to psychology, such as the idea that we only use 10% of our brain. Hosted by Dr. Karla Lassonde and Dr. Emily Stark, psychology professors, we discuss misconceptions about psychology and how they have been researched by psychological scientists.
Today, we're gonna talk about a common misconception. And when we listen to music, we think of the music that we love, the music that we enjoy. Well, there's information that has leaned into this idea that classical music, specifically listening to Mozart, has something to do with enhancing their intelligence. And, yeah, I mean, it's such a phenomenon that has really shaped culture, considering not just the music that we listen to, but how music plays its way into our cognitive ability. And so today we're going to look at the impact that Mozart and other classical music may have on how our children develop and their intelligence.
Emily:That is a neat idea. And I know just talking to my students that many of them really like to study with music, though sometimes I caution them to say, well, right, we don't necessarily want it to be music that's distracting, so that might interfere. But yeah, I could see how maybe even more complex music like classical music, maybe people are saying like, Oh, that it's forcing the brain to think about patterns or different types of things that might relate to intelligence. Though maybe that's a little bit of a stretch.
Karla:Yeah. And we'll really look at this idea that can music and the type of music we listen to cause or change your intelligence and cognitive ability? And that's a question that comes up fairly often in psychological research. So we'll see. My name is Karla Lassonde and I'm a cognitive psychologist.
Emily:And my name is Emily Stark and I'm a social psychologist. And this is Brains vs. Beliefs Debunking Psychological Misconceptions.
Karla:The misconception we'll be discussing today is that listening to classical music makes babies and children more intelligent.
Emily:Alright, let's hear about it.
Karla:Yeah. Several areas of psychological research have focused on the benefits of music. As you said, Emily, when college students study, we often talk in our own field about the benefits and, you know, not using lyrics versus using sound that is more relaxing and soothing, instrumental. Speaking of college students, this particular misconception is thought to be picked up in the early '90s. And college students, if we haven't talked about it before on this show, we use college students as what's called a convenience sample.
Karla:We are around them. Those are the folks that we have access to. And it's more easy, you know, that convenient part.
Emily:They want to earn extra credit by participating in our research studies.
Karla:Absolutely. It's a good way for them to learn about research as well,
Karla:Which is whhat we want them to do. Here in the early '90s, researchers were wanting to talk a little bit about the role of music, particularly in cognition. So we think of cognition as not just intelligence, but how you problem solve, how you think, how you solve complex ideas and problems. So the college students, they listen to ten minutes of music, and one of the groups, we have different groups typically to control for effects, they listen to classical music. And the researchers selected Mozart, a small clip from Mozart.
Karla:And after ten minutes of classical music, compared to the students who were in the no classical music or no music at all, they ended up showing a small improvement on an intelligence test that they took immediately after listening.
Emily:Interesting. So they listened to Mozart, took an intelligence test, and the ones I guess the ones who had listened to Mozart are showing better scores on that. Alright.
Karla:Yeah. Okay. Intelligence is a very tricky thing to measure. We'll probably talk about intelligence on another show. When you think of IQ, there are certain tests in stone that have been known to measure your IQ, but this doesn't have anything to do with your emotional intelligence or social intelligence.
Karla:So the intelligence that they were looking at specifically are batteries of tests that talk about your general ability to think and solve problems. Now, one of the tests happened to be a generic test that we'll talk a little bit about later that has to do with problem solving for moving things in space. We'll get to that a bit of time. What we know, though, about IQ, and perhaps what was really interesting about this small benefit, is we want to be smart.
Emily:Yeah, we value that.
Karla:Especially within areas of research, there's always this push to try to measure and decide what IQ is. And this wasn't necessarily in the intent, but it was picked up by journalists very quickly.
Emily:Oh, I bet. Yeah.
Karla:And the idea initially, remember, is that college students, they showed a small, enhanced ability to solve this one particular set of problems on the IQ test, and it generalized very fast. It's similar to playing the phone game where you say something, I say something, and we go downstream to the final person and it's become a rumor.
Emily:Of course. I mean, love when popular media talks about psychology, but this does seem to happen a lot where the types of things that journalists sometimes say about it are not necessarily closely tied to what the researchers actually did and found. That's what this sounds like here.
Karla:Yeah, and not necessarily their fault. We talk a lot about how journalists become science communicators, they, I'm sure, do some training. But it is important to think, like, what is the media picking up on? And over time, college students became dropped as the focus, and it became babies and children can benefit somehow by listening to a certain type of music.
Emily:That's so interesting. So that did not come from the original research. That was this addition. And I guess I can see it, where if it made these adults smarter, why wouldn't it also work in babies? But that's fascinating.
Karla:Yeah, and if IQ is something we talk about that's kind of set at birth, our abilities are fairly grounded. And so the idea would be like, let's start as early as possible. And within developmental research, we found that babies can hear sounds in the womb about We 23 talk a little bit about in some of our classes, development classes, listening to people's voice that you're familiar with as a baby in the womb. And so it could be very pleasing for both parent, mother, and child to listen to music, but this benefit led to a large on onslaught of marketing.
Emily:Oh, of course it did. Can we make money off this idea? Absolutely.
Karla:Yeah. And if we can make money not just with children, and that's a huge market, but also, you know, pre birth.
Emily:Oh, yeah.
Karla:There's a lot of things, especially, now when we think of how we're influenced and how the media really tells us what we wanna buy. Well, perhaps you've heard of it, but, Einstein and and Mozart are not the same people. But a teacher, well intended, I'm sure, in 1996, a teacher named Julia Engler Clarke, she developed this company called Baby Einstein.
Emily:Oh, yes. I've seen those products.
Karla:Yeah. And I'm sure she had the best intentions. She was, again, a school teacher. She wanted to help young children learn and do the best that they can in their environments. And one of the materials that she developed had to do with Mozart.
Karla:So they called this baby Mozart. It became a second video in her series. And believe it or not, so from 1996, Emily, to 2001, Disney picked this up. Oh, wow. Yeah.
Karla:And good for Julie.
Emily:Yeah. She must have made millions.
Karla:She's doing fine. Oh Yeah. Yeah. So they purchased the brand Baby Einstein in 2001, and it becomes the inspiration not only for how they adapted her materials, but also, a show called Little Einsteins. And we can't play the Little Einsteins clip here, of course, but, you know, if we could sing it, it has to do with this, like, kind of little jaunty tune of Einstein and how babies should be really smart.
Karla:Here is a little clip called Little Mozart.
Emily:That is what we should be playing to babies and children. And that's all they need. They're just gonna now become super geniuses. That's yeah.
Karla:And this is a powerful idea. That music, maybe you liked it, maybe you didn't. But if it becomes normal that our development can be influenced by music and product, we have seen this become heavily commercialized. There is a ton of money to be made in child development toys. In fact, if you are a parent or a grandparent or a friend of folks who have children, you'll know that it's a billion dollar industry buying these sorts of toys.
Karla:And I like to think back, I'm a parent of three, I have a very new child, so there's, I'm going in kind of lockstep and thinking about what do children need. And back in the '90s, when this material was being developed, I was doing a little research, I found that it's kind of the first time where buying stuff has this symbol of wealth and health for children.
Emily:So Oh, I suppose. Yeah, I could see I mean, we've always had this, like, consumer mentality for adults, but we extended that down, you're saying, to, like, children and babies. Like, now they need to have these advanced or name brand types of things. Otherwise, then what? You're just the most horrible parent ever.
Karla:Yes. I mean, you talk to grandparents or your parents, they might talk about playing outside until, you know, the street lights came on.
Emily:Yeah. With just a stick as a toy. Yeah.
Karla:And so the idea was that the nineties were really this time where focus became on commercial wealth, symbolic wealth, and this idea that you can use, as you said, toys to enhance how life goes for you. So we see a lot of products like Little Mozart Take Flight. And now, if we can think about what effects thinking that music may have on intelligence in our current time of media and marketing, we really have influencers. We have toy programs, subscription programs where you can start buying products for a baby in the womb and you can continue to foster their development. And so there is, again, this huge billion dollar industry.
Karla:And the idea would be that if we carry on that music is going to influence cognitive development, then let's figure out all the toys all the things that we need in order to not miss that window of intellectual development. And so that puts a pretty heavy lift on this idea that listening to classical music can somehow make us smarter.
Emily:Yeah, I mean beyond the consumerism of it, I mean I do think it's an issue just how much for both adults and kids that we focus on intelligence or that making our babies and children smarter or more intelligent should be one of the top parenting goals. I mean, intelligence is helpful, but I also know that when you start looking at what really predicts like real world success, both maybe being happy at your job or being promoted at your job or being successful in your romantic relationships and friendships, that it's not those markers of IQ are not the biggest predictors. And like social and emotional intelligence also comes into play. And it's something I try to emphasize with my students that, you know, your test scores don't define who you are. This shouldn't be like your entire focus of this.
Emily:And this just seems to keep, you know, enhancing that, I think harmful belief that intelligence is the most important thing, is the be all and end all. Beyond the fact of, well, does this really work? Can we actually even do this to increase intelligence?
Karla:Yeah, the script is set where we have this cause and effect. We can find all the things that make our children safer, smarter, more well adjusted, and this falls into that category. And so, it's a long standing misconception, and we'll talk more about the truth coming up. The misconception that listening to music, in particular Mozart, can make babies and children smarter, again, it came from the way that a popularized study by Rauscher, Shah, and Kai was marketed. And to tell you a little bit more in-depth about the study, this was published in a pretty prolific journal called Nature, and they had 36 college students.
Karla:And if you know anything about research, and even if you don't, 36 is a typical sample in this sort of experimental task, but it's not big.
Emily:It's not tons of people. No.
Karla:It doesn't necessarily generalize. And, we'll talk about one of the ideas is can this effect be seen across different folks, different ages, different stages, and so on. So they have three IQ tests, and we won't talk about two out of the three, but we'll talk about one test where the students who listened to ten minutes of Mozart, in comparison to a relaxation tape sounds nice and even silence, those who listened to the ten minutes of Mozart, art, for all of these folks, there was an IQ test that I think people would love to hate. It's called a spatial temporal decision making task, and what that means is how do you take something that is in space that has a three d component and can you manipulate it in your mind?
Emily:Yeah, I've looked up some examples of these and I remember taking tests like this. And like I am someone, I am good at vocab and I am good at math, but you start giving me these spatial tests and my brain does not enjoy this. So imagine like a flat sheet of paper, like you're seeing a picture of it and it maybe has some designs on it. And then you have to imagine, okay, what if this was folded as a cube? And then like what designs might be next to each other on the cube?
Emily:So can you do this just in your mind? And then you might be shown, okay, here's four options. Which one of these is the correct one? So yeah, like you said, it's taking this two d image and manipulating it in a three d way just in your mind. You don't get actual paper to figure it out.
Emily:Other types of these tests, like they might show people something and then they're asked, okay, which one of these would be a mirror image? So it's like you have to flip it in your brain. And these types of questions are commonly used in a lot of intelligence tests. And yeah, it relates to this like spatial temporal type of reasoning.
Karla:I can tell you in my cognitive psych classes, Emily, I have shown examples of this particular IQ test. And we do talk a little bit about domain specific learning, and psychology folks, I don't want to put them into a certain bubble, but they often talk about not engaging maybe like engineers would in spatial temporal. I know my husband, for example, he is fairly good at manipulating ideas in space outside of his mind, and he'll use this phrase, Well, you just do this, Carla, and you make all these movements. And so I I'm like you. I I don't wanna, like, talk down about our spatial ability, but I don't feel like it's a strength of mine.
Karla:And and so that's why when we show students a test like this, I also had my students look at the box and the designs and say often, like, What? And we also like to do things in real time and space. So remember, we're manipulating it. Now, whether we are good at spatial tasks or not, Getting back to the study of college students, when they listened to Mozart, their immediate performance on that box folding task was eight or nine points higher than the other two conditions.
Emily:Alright. Okay.
Karla:And, you know, how do we quantify eight or nine points? Who knows? I mean, was markedly, statistically, what we talk about in psychology better. But guess what, Emily?
Emily:Oh, no.
Karla:In ten or fifteen minutes, the temporary boost that the researchers saw in this particular study, it was gone.
Emily:Of course. Yeah. Of course. So this is a study that had small groups of college students listen to ten minutes of music, do a paper folding task right away, do a little better, ten minutes later, no difference. And now Disney is spending millions of dollars on baby Mozart some years later?
Emily:Like, how does this happen?
Karla:Yeah. And without degrading, like, the whole field, this is where it's tricky, how information from research, gets espoused within the general public. No one's trying to harm each other here. The journalists picked this up. Other media picked it up, and they twisted it very quickly to babies because that seemed to fit in, not necessarily as planned, but again, at that time, this idea of marketing, how we can raise healthy and happy and intelligent children.
Karla:And never was it said out loud that the effect on intelligence was temporary. Yeah. Yeah. So this became such a wildly popular idea within the late '90s and early 2000s that the governor of Georgia proposed a bill to distribute a free classical music CD or cassette tape at that time to new mothers in this particular case.
Emily:I looked this up because I thought this was so fascinating. So yeah, the idea was that asked for $105,000 to give every newborn in the state of Georgia in 1988 or 1998, the CD. And then there was pushback. Like, the legislature did not want to appropriate that money. And so then the Sony Corporation, which has a major production facility in Georgia Nice.
Emily:Stepped in to cover all the costs. So they created this compilation called Build Your Brave Build Your Baby's Brain Through the Power of Music. Oh. And, of course, included some Mozart as well as other classical composers. And this is my favorite part.
Emily:Yeah. It was free to every family with a newborn in Georgia. And then Sony marketed that and sold it to a bunch of other families in other states across The US. So they get the PR for saying, no, no, no. We'll take care of this.
Emily:And who knows how much money they made on this compilation.
Karla:Yes. And people took notice. And people took notice within our community of psychology. And so what they tried to do is they tried to replicate the effect.
Emily:Yes. That's what we do. And
Karla:most times, it was not something that could be replicated.
Emily:So even right away?
Karla:Even right away.
Emily:You're not seeing a change after listening to Mozart. Yep.
Karla:Yeah. And so we're gonna play a clip. It's not just us who are coming out on the side of this isn't correct, but there's other folks within the community that have certainly talked about the benefits or lack thereof of the Mozart effect. So go ahead and listen here to some others talking about that.
Clip speaker:This thing about the Mozart effect just caught on, and it really had nothing to do with Mozart. In fact, the claims in the original paper had very little to do with Mozart. They just happened to choose a Mozart sonata. If they had chosen a Beethoven sonata instead of a Mozart sonata, we'd be talking about the Beethoven effect right now. It's totally an artifact of of of, you know, science journalism and and trying to sell a bunch of papers.
Clip speaker:But sometimes science journalism can go wrong, and it went wrong there. And it turned out to be hogwash.
Emily:Okay. So again, why is this such a common idea?
Karla:Well, again, we want to be smart. True. We want to work well in the worlds that we're in. And so it makes sense that people want control over their learning intelligence, in particular parents.
Emily:Yeah.
Karla:And the other reason, Emily, you know, music is universal. We most of us enjoy music. Whether we listen to it to study or just relax, there's a lot of research on the positive benefit of listening to music on our bodies, on our minds, not necessarily intelligence. For example, a team of researchers in Mexico, they measured heart rate frequency of babies in the womb. So we're back to these real little people.
Karla:And when classical music was played for the mothers, the baby's heart rate became more variable. Now my sleep app at night tells me that heart rate variability is a good thing.
Emily:Oh, okay.
Karla:Yeah. It's like, it's not like, oh, your heart is wildly going too fast or too slow, but that it's somehow a marker, and I'll have to look into this more, of health. Okay.
Emily:Oh, alright then.
Karla:Yeah. Even within these tiny humans in their mother's womb, heart rate variability was considered a positive sign of baby development. Now, that kind of research we're all for. Let's find out how musicand it maybe didn't even have to be Mozartbut how can it make the process of maybe childbirth, the process of caring a childlike, Let's make it comfortable. Let's make it fun.
Karla:If we can affect baby's heart rate or even intelligence, so be it. But we need more research, and sometimes the research on the benefit of music is positive, but it's not long lasting.
Emily:Okay. So we're again seeing, like, yes, music can positively affect us, but it's not like introducing a permanent change. It could be in that moment it might be soothing or have other effects on us, but yeah, not something that's going to continue. We can't just listen to Mozart a few times and now we are different in some lasting way.
Karla:And research comes down on this idea that children who are not just exposed to music but spend several years practicing an instrument, they do find some neurocognitive differences, but that is not this.
Emily:Yep. That is a very different interaction with you.
Karla:Yeah. So studying that group of folks, those children growing up, that might be very different. So laying down this idea of truth, the artifact that music can make babies smarter, we are talking about it here, but also the US Federal Trade Commission stepped in in 2006, seeing maybe how this got off, out of hand. And they targeted baby Einstein saying that they led to false advertising.
Emily:Oh, yeah. They were making a specific claim that was not backed up by research. Well, way to go FTC for Yeah.
Karla:I think that's pretty good. And although the FTC cannot stop the power of the influencer True. And, again, being a parent or anyone that is consuming information for both themselves and their children, it's there's a vulnerability to wanting to do the best for your child. And it's still a very common common issue. There's this wildly popular billion dollar, idea called Cocomelon, which my older two kids missed this popularity.
Karla:And now, like I said, I have a newborn at home, and I'm gonna do my best. Again, like, you know, we're not perfect here. Good luck. But in other words, baby Einstein, Coco Melon, we have we have this highly and heavily commercialized target, that happens to very young audiences.
Emily:It just keeps coming and coming. Yes. If we can figure out a way to make money off something, we definitely will.
Karla:Right. And, you know, there are other issues with now music has morphed into watching these these ideas, these smart music interludes on TV, watching, learning about things, and so much that we have a new issue, not necessarily listening to these products, but viewing these products.
Emily:Screen time.
Karla:That's another concern. A potential episode in the making. Yeah.
Emily:That'd be fun to talk about.
Karla:Just thinking of, like, when is too young to listen listen and watch, these types of materials. So there is, again, that vulnerability out there to everything that you can consume, but we wanna put music into its right goal area and talk about music is good, but the Mozart effect is not it's not a thing, and in fact, has become problematic. So the psychological benefit of music is complex, but we want to hesitate to ever say that one psychological study is going to lead to this cause and effect, in particular, intelligence. So today we find out that this exaggerated claim called the Mozart effect that babies are not smarter after listening to classical music.
Emily:You can learn more about this podcast on our website called communicatingpsychologicalsigns.com. You'll find references and a link to the episode. Feel free to contact us on our website with any comments or ideas for future episodes and follow Brains versus Beliefs wherever you find podcasts. Thanks for listening.