We've seen no small amount of hoopla over the suggestion, first made in the journal Nature in 1993, that listening to Mozart might improve spatial-temporal reasoning abilities. This news set off a series of events that might best be described as a sort of hysteria. What came to be known as the Mozart Effect was received by many as the miraculous make-you-smarter drug we were all waiting for, and parents everywhere promptly stampeded music stores to stock up on the master composer. The state of Florida went so far as to legislate that daycare facilities play Mozart each day. And Governor Zell Miller of Georgia mandated that every new mother was to take home a copy of Mozart's "Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major," convincing a major record company to cover the cost.
And to be fair, whether it makes kids smarter or not, a little classical music is probably not going to do any harm.
But in the nearly eight years since Gordon Shaw and Frances Rauscher, researchers at UC-Irvine, sprung the Mozart Effect on the world, much has happened in the field of music and brain research. For one, scientists have come out of the woodwork to either discount or corroborate the Mozart Effect. One researcher has even reported that listening to New Age composer Yanni improves cognitive skills.
But the Yanni Effect, thankfully, hasn't caught on yet—presumably for good reason. And no matter: other things of even more interest have been brewing.
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