The Mozart effect can refer to: A set of research results that indicate that listening to Mozart’s music may induce a short-term improvement on the performance of certain kinds of mental tasks known as spatial-temporal reasoning; popularized versions of the theory, which suggest that ‘listening to Mozart makes you smarter, or that early childhood exposure to classical music has a beneficial effect on mental development. The term was first coined by Alfred A. Tomatis who used Mozart’s music as the listening stimulus in his work attempting to cure a variety of disorders.
The approach has been popularized in a book by Don Campbell, and is based on an experiment published in ‘Nature’ suggesting that listening to Mozart temporarily boosted scores on one portion of the IQ test. As a result, the Governor of Georgia, Zell Miller, proposed a budget to provide every child born in Georgia with a CD of classical music. Subsequent studies have had limited success duplicating the Mozart effect, and its validity is debated.
The Daily Omnivore 
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