#1317 Mozart Effect

Researchers have debunked the much-publicised idea, known as the Mozart effect, that listening to classical music improves children's ability to reason about spatial relations and other nonverbal tasks. Learning to play a musical instrument or to sing, [1] , may indeed give youngsters an intellectual edge over their peers, a new study [2] . Six-year-olds who took weekly piano or singing lessons throughout the school year [3] an average IQ increase of 7.0 points, says psychologist E. Glenn Schellenberg of the University of Toronto at Mississauga. Other 6-year-olds who [4] took weekly drama lessons or received no extracurricular lessons displayed an average IQ rise of 4. 3 points, Schellenberg reports in the August Psychological Science.