On Thu, 16 Jun 2005, Tommy Kelly wrote:
> http://skepdic.com/mozart.html
>
> "The idea for the Mozart effect originated in 1993 at the University of
> California, Irvine, with physicist Gordon Shaw and Frances Rauscher, a
> former concert cellist and an expert on cognitive development. They studied
> the effects on a few dozen college students of listening to the first 10
> minutes of the Mozart Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major (K.448). They found a
> temporary enhancement of spatial-temporal reasoning, as measured by the
> Stanford-Binet IQ test. No one else has been able to duplicate their
> results."
Here's an interesting conceptual replication, though: researchers randomly assigned grade school children to music lessons, drama lessons, or no after school program. Academic performance a year later was significantly higher for the children who participated in the music program. I don't have the reference here at home, but there are a number of examples of rigorous experimental studies with the same result: music education/exposure enhances cognitive ability.
Miles