Do, Re, Mi, Fa-get the Piano Lessons: Music May Not Make You Smarter

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Do, Re, Mi, Fa-get the Piano Lessons: Music May Not Make You Smarter

Music can soothe the soul and speed along creativity, but it won’t, according to researchers from Harvard, boost intelligence. “More than 80 percent of American adults think that music improves children’s grades or intelligence,” said Samuel Mehr, a Harvard Graduate School of Education doctoral student working in the lab of psychology professor Elizabeth Spelke, in a statement. The myth that music improves intelligence can be tied to a study published in 1993 in the journal Nature, which describes the ”Mozart effect” as the ability for individuals who play instruments to perform better at spatial tasks. When the Harvard investigators reviewed the available research connecting music and intelligence, they found that only five studies used randomized trials, the gold standard of scientific research in which participants were randomly assigned to either learn music or not, and only one reported a clear correlation to intelligence.

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