If you\u2019ve got your kid in piano lessons because you think it will make her smarter, Harvard researchers have some bad news for you. Despite widespread belief to the contrary, there is little to no evidence to conclude that music improves intelligence.<\/p>\n
\u201cMore than 80 per cent of American adults think that music improves children\u2019s grades or intelligence,\u201d Samuel Mehr, a doctoral student in the Harvard graduate school of education, said in a statement. \u201cEven in the scientific community, there\u2019s a general belief that music is important for these extrinsic reasons. But there is very little evidence supporting the idea that music classes enhance children\u2019s cognitive development.\u201d<\/p>\n
So where did we get the idea that music makes you smarter? It was popularized by a study published in the journal Nature in 1993. That study gave us the so-called \u201cMozart effect,\u201d the name given by researchers who said that listening to the composer\u2019s music for as little as 10 minutes improved people\u2019s performance on spatial tasks.<\/p>\n
The study, however, has since been debunked.<\/p>\n
But still, the myth persists. In part because there have been many studies that have linked music and cognitive ability.<\/p>\n
Dig through those studies, however, as Mehr did, and you\u2019ll find only five of them used randomized trials. And of those five, only one showed that music had a clear effect. And that effect was negligible \u2013 only a 2.7 point increase in IQ after one year of music lessons.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe experimental work on this question is very much in its infancy, but the few published studies on the topic show little evidence for \u2018music makes you smarter,\u2019\u201d Mehr said.<\/p>\n
Mehr and colleagues tested the connection between music and intelligence in two studies.<\/p>\n
In the first, 29 parents and four-year-old children were randomly assigned to either a music training class or a visual arts class.<\/p>\n
Parents and kids were tested for cognition, vocabulary, mathematics and two spatial tasks.<\/p>\n
\u201cInstead of using something general, like an IQ test, we tested four specific domains of cognition,\u201d Mehr said. \u201cIf there really is an effect of music training on children\u2019s cognition, we should be able to better detect it here than in previous studies, because these tests are more sensitive than tests of general intelligence.\u201d<\/p>\n
What did the results show? No evidence of a link.<\/p>\n
A second study enlarged the number of participants to 45 parents and children. Half of them were given music training, while half got none.<\/p>\n
Again, no link was found between learning music and increased intelligence.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven when we used the finest-grained statistical analyses available to us, the effects just weren\u2019t there,\u201d Mehr said.<\/p>\n
Does that mean we should yank those violins out of kids\u2019 hands? Obviously not.<\/p>\n
There are plenty of benefits to learning music other than increased intelligence, Mehr said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t teach kids Shakespeare because we think it will help them do better on the SATs. We do it because we believe Shakespeare is important.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If you\u2019ve got your kid in piano lessons because you think it will make her smarter, Harvard researchers have some bad news for you. Despite widespread belief to the contrary, there is little to no evidence to conclude that music improves intelligence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":838,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health"],"yoast_head":"\n