If Music Lessons Make You Smarter, Why Aren't Professional Musicians Geniuses?
E. Glenn Schellenberg - g.schellenberg@utoronto.ca
Department of Psychology
University of Toronto Mississauga
Mississauga, ON, Canada L5L 1C6
Popular version of paper 4aMU3
Presented Thursday morning, October 29, 2009
158th ASA Meeting, San Antonio, TX
The 1993 publication of an article in Nature stimulated widespread scientific and public interest in the idea that music makes you smarter. What does the research conducted since then tell us about this notion?
First of all, its clear that the side-effects of music listening are not the same as side-effects of music lessons. We now know that music listening changes how you feel, and that how you feel influences your performance on a variety of tests that measure intellectual abilities. In other words, the association between music listening and intellectual performance is a by-product of the listeners emotional state. And because the emotional state of the listener is crucial, the most effective music depends on the particular group you choose to study. Adults show a Mozart effect if they enjoy listening to Mozart. They may also show a Schubert effect, whereas 10- to 12-year-olds show a pop song effect and 5-year-olds show a childrens play song effect.
Music lessons are a more complicated story. Although many scientists claim that music lessons are associated with some specific intellectual abilities (e.g., verbal, spatial, or mathematical) but not with others, an overview of the available research makes it clear that the association between music and intellectual abilities is very broad, extending across a wide variety of cognitive tasks.
Another issue involves whether music lessons cause intellectual benefits, or, alternatively, whether brighter children are simply more likely than other children to take music lessons. In one experiment that assigned first-graders randomly to a year of music lessons, drama lessons, or no lessons, the experimental design and the results allowed scientists to conclude that music lessons do indeed improve intelligence. When another study tested the IQs of children and young adults, taking music lessons for a longer duration of time was associated with higher IQs, even after accounting for alternative explanations such as family income or parents education. Nevertheless, these results do not exclude the possibility that smarter children are also more likely than other children to take music lessons.
If music lessons enhance intelligence and the association becomes stronger as you take more lessons, professional musicians should be geniuses. This is not the case. Rather, it appears that the positive effects are limited to children who take music lessons as an extra-curricular activity in addition to attending school. Other extra-curricular activities, such as sports or drama and other arts lessons, do not have the same effect. When studying music at advanced levels is simply substituted, however, for comparable activities such as studying law, business, or psychology, associations between music lessons and intelligence tend to disappear.
The best explanation of the available research is that high-functioning children are more likely than other children to take music lessons, which, in turn, exaggerate their intellectual advantage. Moreover, the available scientific evidence implies that broad associations between music and intellectual abilities are likely to be the consequence of an intermediate factor, such as test-taking abilities, which are enhanced by improvements in attention, concentration, focus, planning, and so on, that music lessons foster.