The Mozart Effect - Does it incease your IQ?

The Mozart effect is the theory that simply hearing classical music, typically Mozart, can increase your IQ or boost certain parts of your intellect. It all began with Alfred Tomatis who conducted simple experiments where he attempted to use Mozart symphonies as stimulus to cure a variety of different disorders. A later experiment was conducted where Mozart was used on students to try and increase the IQ by 8 or 9 points.

Another study was conducted where children of 3 and 4 were given 8 months of piano tutoring then given IQ tests. They typically scored 34% higher on tests of spatio-temporal reasoning than the other control groups who were given singing lessons, computer lessons or no lessons at all.

While the results and effects of the Mozart effect may have been blown out of proportion and gained a large amount of weight in the media, it is still an interesting and significant finding and shows that the IQ can be increased temporarily simply by activating certain parts of the brain passively.