The Mozart non-effect

Remember the Mozart effect? That was the idea that if we only expose our infants and young children to a bit of music, specifically Mozart’s (and particularly his Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major), the little ones will receive a big boost in intelligence. What parent could possibly be against that? Indeed, the States of Georgia and Florida at one point enacted legislation to take advantage of the Mozart effect. In 1998 Georgia paid for the distribution of classical music CDs to the mothers of newborns, and Florida required state-funded day care centers to play the music daily.

I was reminded of this debacle of uncritical thinking recently, while reading Richard Wiseman’s 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot, which debunks a lot of self-help notions, while introducing people to actual research in cognitive science that can help their lives.

The Mozart effect craze got started with a single paper published in 1993 by a group at the University of California who found — on the basis of studying just 36 college students (divided into three experimental treatments, which means that the actual sample size was a mere 13 individuals) — that people who had listened to Mozart’s Sonata did significantly better on standard intelligence tests when compared to people who had listened to a relaxation tape and to people who had just sat in silence for a bit.

Now, the authors did note that the effect was only temporary (lasting about ten minutes), and when they repeated the experiment two years later they found partially contradictory results, since the Mozart effect was about the same magnitude as the “just sit in silence” effect when compared to listening to trance music.

The media, however, jumped on the story, and the notion of the Mozart effect rapidly became an established scientific truth in the minds of many, even though no study had actually been performed on children. Worse yet, a more recent analysis of multiple studies of the same type revealed that either there was no effect at all or that its magnitude was very very small. And of course, whenever the effect was detected it actually had nothing to do with Mozart per se, much less with the Sonata in D Major specifically. Indeed, it seems that listening to anything that the subjects find pleasant or relaxing — including a story by Stephen King — temporarily (and slightly) boosts their IQ, while listening to unpleasant or depressing music results in lower scores on intelligence tests. The Mozart effect qua Mozart effect doesn’t exist, but what is true is that mood has an effect on how people perform on difficult tasks. Duh.

The whole episode looks a lot like Murder on the Orient Express, the Agatha Christie mystery (spoiler alert!) where it turns out that every single one of the suspects had actually committed the murder. Similarly, in the case of the Mozart effect we have the following full spectrum of suspects to blame: the scientists who published a paper based on an incredibly simplistic experimental design and on a minute sample size of a very non-random population; the journalists who uncritically wrote about the story and single-handedly made it a rapidly spreading piece of “common knowledge”; the politicians (in Georgia and Florida) who quickly committed public money to something that simply should have sounded much too good to be true; and of course the public itself, always ready to criticize and dismiss solid science (think evolution, global warming, vaccines, or anti-HIV drugs) and yet eager to take advantage of the latest “silver bullet” that would save us all the trouble of actually being responsible parents, consumers, patients, voters, and so on.

Of course, the Mozart effect debacle was simply a drop in the bucket in the large ocean of pseudoscientific nonsense. It was certainly not as costly as US Government programs to use telepathy to defeat the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and not as lethal as people failing to vaccinate their kids, or to take anti-HIV drugs — not to mention of course the colossal costs, both financial and ecological, of dismissing climate change.

Nonetheless, the Mozart effect story strikes me as a quintessential example of why it is so difficult to achieve that most elusive goal of a more rational society where we make our decisions in a thoughtful and empirically informed way. What’s next? A pill that magically lifts your mood, allows you to see the world more optimistically, and instantly makes you a functional — if somewhat dull — member of society? Oh, right, that one has been around for some time...