by Matt Lipford

Created on: May 05, 2008   Last Updated: February 27, 2011

Having helped my wife co-run her own daycare business, it was easy to see one simple and clear thread that tied all the parents of the children we enrolled together: a concern over intelligence and the child's capacity to learn. One morning, a mother of an 18 month-old girl we had just enrolled showed up at our doorstep to drop her daughter off. In her hand, she was clutching a video tape. As she showed us the tape, her eyes and voice filled with enthusiasm. The video was called "Baby Mozart" and she claimed that it was supposed to increase the IQ level of children.

The Baby Mozart videotape is a part of the "Humanities for Babies" series from Family Home Entertainment. The inner sleeve of the video box itself claims that actual research has uncovered a relationship between Mozart's music and an increase in a child's reasoning and intelligence. This, the video tape claims, is a phenomenon popularly known as "The Mozart Effect".

There have been numerous accounts of actual scientific research done on the so-called "Mozart Effect". My first glimpse into this field was in a cover story from a March 1999 issue of Bay Area Parent. The cover of the magazine depicted a baby holding a musical toy, smiling, with the caption "Can Music Boost IQ?" in bold lettering across the top.

The article focused primarily on IQ-boosting musical toys, music and its calming effects, and some of the experiments done in this field of research. Mozart was the mainstay of the research. Scientists were reportedly claiming huge successes in making the connection between the music of Mozart and the IQ. Most of these experiments were performed at the Music Intelligence Neural Development (or M.I.N.D.) Institute.

Formed in 1997 by a team of scientists, the M.I.N.D. institute claims to be a not-for-profit interdisciplinary research facility who pioneered the research into music as a window to higher brain function. The core emphasis of the research was embodied in a theory coined the "trion model". The model, developed by scientists Gordon Shaw (University of California, Irvine) and Xiadoan Leng (Pasadena City College) predicted a "causal basis for music enhancing spatial-temporal reasoning".

A rough translation of spatial-temporal reasoning is the mind's ability to transform mental images in the absence of a physical image. According to the M.I.N.D. Institute, spatial-temporal reasoning is "required for such higher brain functions as music, chess and math". Leng and Shaw proposed that advanced

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