Mozart Effect

Does classical music really make babies and children smarter?

If you inundated your kids with classical music in the womb or while they were babies – they should be geniuses by now, right? Not necessarily. According to Sam Wang, author of “Welcome to Your Brain,” that’s all a myth. The misconception stems from a 1993 study of college students who performed much better at folding and cutting paper after listening to Mozart. Neuroscientists haven’t been able to replicate the “Mozart Effect” with babies or people of any age.

That doesn’t mean you should kick music to the intellectual curb. There is solid evidence that children who learn to play a musical instrument have better spatial reasoning skills than those who don’t. If you’ve got a college student who needs to cut and fold a lot of paper – my all means – crank up the Mozart.