Listening to Mozart enhances spatial-temporal reasoning: towards a neurophysiological basis

An experiment replicates findings which showed that listening to a Mozart piano sonata produced significant short-term enhancement of spatial-temporal reasoning in college students, and shows that 'repetitive' music does not enhance reasoning; a taped short story does not enhancing reasoning; and long-term memory is not enhanced.

Abstract

Motivated by predictions of a structured neuronal model of the cortex, we performed a behavioral experiment which showed that listening to a Mozart piano sonata produced significant short-term enhancement of spatial-temporal reasoning in college students. Here we present results from an experiment which replicates these findings, and shows that (i) 'repetitive' music does not enhance reasoning; (ii) a taped short story does not enhance reasoning; and (iii) short-term memory is not enhanced. We propose experiments designed to explore the neurophysiological bases of this causal enhancement of spatial-temporal reasoning by music, and begin to search for quantitative measures of further higher cognitive effects of music.