The Mozart Effect

From Wikipedia

The Mozart effect can refer to:

• A set of research results that indicate that listening to Mozart’s music may induce a short-term improvement on the performance of certain kinds of mental tasks known as “spatial-temporal reasoning;”
• Popularized versions of the hypothesis, which suggest that "listening to Mozart makes you smarter", or that early childhood exposure to classical music has a beneficial effect on mental development;
• A US trademark for a set of commercial recordings and related materials, which are claimed to harness the effect for a variety of purposes. The trademark owner, Don Campbell, Inc. claims benefits far beyond improving spatio-temporal reasoning or raising intelligence, defining the mark as "an inclusive term signifying the transformational powers of music in health, education, and well-being."

The term was first coined by Alfred A. Tomatis who used Mozart's music as the listening stimulus in his work attempting to cure a variety of disorders. The approach has been popularized in a book by Don Campbell, and is based on an experiment published in Nature suggesting that listening to Mozart temporarily boosted scores on one portion of the IQ test. As a result, the Governor of Georgia, Zell Miller, proposed a budget to provide every child born in Georgia with a CD of classical music.

Everyone knows that Mozart was a genius. But could his talent go beyond just writing beautiful music? Was he somehow guided to create music that is mathematically complex and that somehow triggers and inspires our brains in unseen ways?

Interesting uses for Mozart’s music:

Sewage plant plays Mozart to stimulate microbes

Improved maze learning through early music exposure in rats

The Mozart Effect and epilepsy