Classical Music: Does it Really Make You Smart?

Classical Music: Does it Really Make You Smart?
Are you an avid fan of old school music or perhaps an individual from the classical music generation? Do you hear stories from your parents when they put you to bed when you are little while Mozart, Chopin or Beethoven is playing on the background?

All throughout our past years, a lot of individuals believed that listening to classical music makes you even smart. However, there is actually a fair mixed message on this topic.

You might have heard of the well known phrase which is referred to us as “the Mozart effect”. It refers to a set of studies in which they say that listening to Mozart’s music can actually “make you smarter”. And many people think that if you play classical music to an infant, they would grow up to be intelligent adults. Well, not really.

The authors from the University of California in where the studies about the Mozart effect were conducted actually did not perform the experiment on children, but on young adult students. They were given series of mental tests to complete in which some improvements were seen while listening to the classic music of Mozart.
However, these are just short-term improvements on their “spatial-temporal reasoning” which is the ability to picture patterns and understand how objects fit into it. Another recent study in Britain was conducted in 2006, where children listened to 10 minutes of Mozart versus children listening to a series of pop music. The end result having the children listened to pop music did even better than the ones listening to the classics.

Many studies have been conducted which proves that although listening to classical music does not really make you smarter, but music itself has a beneficial effect on both children and adults – a life-long love of rhythm, melody or beat perhaps?