I saw an article in a baby magazine, which quoted a music teacher to guide pregnant women in musical prenatal education. The content is surprising! Music teachers have stated that listening to music (especially Mozart's music) can "increase IQ by 30%", "change BB's fate of becoming a weak child", and "can even turn a child (from a weak child) into a gifted child in the future". There is no scientific evidence. The author has been engaged in the education and treatment of special children for a long time, and deeply understands that training time is very important for the learning of special children. If a mother believes that listening to music can increase IQ by up to 30%, (that is, it can change from mild mental retardation to normal intelligence) ), she may have been lax in her child's training and treatment. Therefore, after reading the article, the author immediately wrote to the magazine and asked for clarification on its exaggerated and inaccurate reports. Unfortunately, they did not respond. Why is it often said that listening to music can improve IQ? And the name you often hear is Mozart? The author hopes to talk about the reasons here. First of all, the idea that listening to Mozart can temporarily improve a certain aspect of intelligence comes from a study conducted by the University of California (UC, Irvine) in 1995 (1). A group of college students listened to a piano sonata by Mozart. After ten minutes, their average Spatial-temporal reasoning score increased by nine points, while the other groups who listened to stories, relaxation instructions, British-style trance music, and the group that listened to no sound, Participation in spatial-temporal reasoning scores did not improve. Please note that visual thinking is only one of the items in the IQ test, and the ability to improve scores disappears after ten minutes. Although in the above study, listening to Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major (K448) can briefly (approximately) ten minutes) to improve image thinking, but some other studies have shown that it does not have this ability (6,7). That being the case, where does the claim that listening to Mozart can increase your IQ by 30% come from? It turns out that in order to find a way to maintain the spatial-temporal reasoning ability improved by music, this group of research students changed the research method to just listening. This time they used a group of three to four-year-old children divided into four groups. One group learned to play piano, another group learned to play computers, another group learned to sing, and the last group learned nothing (control group). The results showed that the spatial-temporal reasoning ability of the group of children who learned piano and piano increased by 34% (2); while this score of the other groups did not improve. Since image thinking ability is one of the items in the intelligence test, the author also believes that it will have a certain impact on the overall IQ score. The results of the study show that listening to Mozart can temporarily improve visual thinking ability, while learning piano can maintain this ability. As for the reports about the effects of Mozart's music, most of them are exaggerated. The most common one is to confuse the research on listening to music and learning piano; turning just the ability of image thinking into the improvement of overall IQ; Coupled with the boasting in advertisements by some irresponsible businessmen, "listening to Mozart can improve IQ" has become a specious argument. Simply put, there is no evidence that listening to music/Mozart can improve IQ. On the contrary, more research shows that learning music (especially piano) can help improve visual thinking (2), mathematical ability (3), vocabulary memory (4) and reading ability (5). There are certainly many benefits to listening to music, and Mozart is one of my favorite musicians. However, based on the current scientific research results, there is no evidence that listening to music alone can improve IQ.