Have you ever listened to music while studying? Does it help you concentrate or help you better perform tasks? There was actually a study conducted to prove if music helps people with tasks or not. It is called the Mozart Effect.

  According to thefreedictionary.com the term the Mozart Effect is used to describe the research done by a group of students from the University of California, Irvine, Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw, and Katherine Ky. The Mozart Effect was a theory that Mozart music may improve spatial-temporal reasoning for a short period of time. Spatial-temporal reasoning is the ability to mentally move objects in space and time to solve multi-step problems. 

   The first study of the Mozart Effect was conducted in 1993. The three researchers took 36 college students and divided them up into three different groups. Each group listened to different sounds. One group listened to silence, one group listened to relaxing music, and the last group listened to a Mozart sonata. Each group listened for ten minutes.

  When they were done listening the students were tested on their spatial-temporal reasoning. The IQ scores of the students who had listened to Mozart music were up to nine points higher than the other two groups, but these results only lasted for a short amount of time. The group published their finding in a journal called Nature, a British scientific journal.

  Two year later the same group of researchers conducted a follow-up study. This time they tested 79 college students over a period of five days. On the first day of the study they tested all 79 students on their spatial-temporal reasoning and then divided the students into three groups. On days two through five, each group had one of three different listening experiences. Group one listened to Mozart for ten minutes each day. On day two, group two listened to ten minutes of music by Philip Glass, and American composer, on day three they listened to ten minutes of a story, and on day four they listened to ten minutes of dance music. The last group listened to ten minutes of silence each day.

  On day five, all three of the groups were again tested on their spatial-temporal reasoning. The results of this study were different from the results of the first study. These results showed that the Mozart music only increased spatial-temporal reasoning on the first day. On days two through five there were no differences between the three groups.

  There have been many studies to try and prove the Mozart Effect but all of the studies lead to the same answers. After 15 years of studies, scientist still can not prove if the Mozart Effect is a myth or not. If the Mozart Effect can not be proven then why does it seem like music helps? If it seems like music helps study does that help prove the Mozart Effect or is it just in our head that we think music helps us?

  Although Mozart music doesn’t make your baby smarter and hasn’t been proven to increase spatial-temporal reasoning, maybe it helps stimulate other parts of the brain that helps you learn and that’s why people think that Mozart music or music in general helps you learn.