One of the most popular beliefs in parenting is the so - called Mozart effect, which says that listening to music by the Austrian composer Wolfgang Mozart can increase a child's intelligence. Some pregnant women have even gone so far as to play Mozart recordings on headphones pressed against their bellies. And it's not hard to see how Mozart's name became associated with accelerated development. He was history's greatest child genius, performing astonishing music for kings and queens at an age when many of us were content with tuneless singing "I'm a Little Teapot".
So, if you have kids or you're expecting to have them, how seriously should you take the Mozart effect? Will the child who doesn't listen to Mozart in the cradle (摇篮) be limited to an ordinary life? Are you a bad parent if your kids don't know about any works of Mozart?
Relax. There is no scientific evidence that listening to Mozart improves children's cognitive (认知) abilities. The whole idea comes from a small study done in 1993, which found that college students who listened to Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major (K 448) showed some improvement in a test of spatial (空间的) skills. This finding was later described as something extremely amazing by a musician, Don Campbell, in a book. Campbell's claims about the super powers of Mozart's music were repeated endlessly in the media and fueled a craze for Mozart﹣based enrichment activities. In 1998, for example, the governor of Georgia in the USA requested funds to send classical﹣music CDs to all parents of newborns in the state.
Since then, scientists have examined the claim that Mozart increases intelligence and found no evidence for it. The original experiment with college students was reviewed in 1999, and the increase in the students' spatial skills was found to be insignificant. In 2007 the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research asked a team of experts to examine the scientific literature regarding Mozart and child development, and they found no reason to believe that it increased intelligence.
