Sometimes I put my AirPods in when I study, but instead of lyrics sliding into my ears on the waves of an upbeat melody, there is silence. Try as I might to play a song to set the mood — anything to make the act of studying more exciting — I just simply cease studying. It is not that I consciously give up, but it seems that my brain cannot operate at its standard capacity while background music plays. Add in lyrics and I am an entirely lost cause. In the middle of a paragraph for a school assignment, I’ll catch myself instead writing the bridge that is playing in my ear, or I’ll be stuck rereading the same (fairly basic) sentence over and over again until I give up on the idea of a “study playlist.” Even going as tame as classical music, I find the musical notes a distraction.
Yet I seem to be in the minority in facing this problem. Unless the array of AirPods and Apple headphones are purely aesthetic choices, a lot of students at the University of Michigan tend to listen to music as they work on campus. When I head to the library with my friends, I am often the only one at the table without the accompaniment of a playlist. And while I am there to study, and I know I do that best sans music, I can’t help but feel like I am missing out. Trust me, I have tried to adopt my friends’ habits, going as far as taking one of their AirPods so that we can study in sync, listening to the exact same songs. Yet each optimistic venture quickly derails into me asking them to lower the volume every couple of minutes, until I acquiesce and return to the noise of my surroundings.
I would never dare imply that everyone who is listening to music is denying themselves of their full academic potential simply because of my own experiences. Clearly what works for some is not what works for all. And at this point in our education, I would trust that those who do listen to music while they study have figured out what works for them, so I must believe that their playlists are conducive to their learning.
But I remain intrigued with this idea that listening to music can be effective for studying. Perhaps it is the contradiction of my personal experience that makes me curious about this phenomenon. Our brains all work differently. In settings where performance matters, it is natural to want to control all of the factors we can to optimize our chances for success. So, am I doing something wrong?
Modern society would certainly make that case, but current science does not. Claims that music makes you smarter, helps you focus and enhances your performance abound the internet. These catchy headlines have clearly filtered into our daily lives. From rearing children to growing plants, exposure to classical music is heralded as a quick fix to better their growth. Parenting websites even propose playing classical music for unborn babies in the womb, claiming that the notes of the songs improve their cognitive development, specifically through language acquisition.
As a novice to the intellectual benefits of music and the surrounding research, I won’t attempt to refute this claim. But I am doubtful. I surmise that raising a child is a stressful endeavor and that new parents are rather easy targets for intimidation. If a wireless, womb music, Bluetooth belly speaker is all that stands between their future child and their future child’s increased standardized reading scores, can I really blame them for trying it out?
Perhaps not. In this instance, I’ll choose to blame science. Or more specifically, the miscommunication of scientific results. According to the Harvard Gazette, 80% of American adults believe that listening to music makes you smarter. The general acceptance of this falsehood can be traced back to a 1993 study and the media headlines that followed its publication. Francis Rauscher, a doctorate psychologist and cellist, conducted a study to explore the relationship between music cognition and abstract reasoning cognition. To do this, she enlisted 36 college students and subjected them to three sets of randomly chosen IQ tests, with varying pre-exam conditions. For ten minutes before each test, the students either listened to Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major, K. 448, a relaxation tape or silence. Based on the mean scores of each category, Rauscher concluded that listening to Mozart led to heightened spatial reasoning capabilities for the subsequent 10 minutes. In her paper, Rauscher acknowledged the temporality of Mozart’s effect on heightened capabilities, as well as the specificity of the effect to spatial reasoning, having not tested other measures of general intelligence. Yet the media took “Mozart Effect” and ran with it.
Headlines from news outlets made the generous leap that Rauscher had proven that listening to classical music makes children smarter. Never mind the fact that the “smartness” was defined by a singular set of tests, lasted only 10 minutes after exposure to Mozart and was tested on the brains of college students, not babies. The idea grew so popular that in 1998, the governor of Georgia proposed a state budget that included funding for classical CDs to be sent home with every newborn child (in case you are curious, the CDs ended up being supplied by Sony Productions for free).
More recent research has cast doubt on these findings and has certainly disputed that this effect is specific to Mozart’s music. Two additional effects have been proposed: the arousal-mood hypothesis and seductive detail effect. The arousal-mood hypothesis postulates that any increase in ability after listening to music is not the direct result of the music itself but is instead a reflection of the boost of enjoyment you derive from the music. The seductive detail effect paints music as an extraneous stimulus for the brain, occupying space in our working memory that could have been used for the task at hand, therefore making it a distraction. This theory certainly explains my relationship with study music — but even so, studies have produced mixed conclusions about music’s effect on concentration.
Regardless of the “truth” and if we will ever truly know it, the portrayal of Rauscher’s research findings by the media was certainly wrong. Not only was the leap to general intelligence unfounded but also the application of the findings to babies. The more rational target of the media would have been college students pre-exam, not babies pre-birth. But even the effects of listening to music for college students should be taken with a grain of salt. A meta-analysis of multiple studies concluded that there was limited support for the Mozart Effect, which is now accepted by the psychology community as a myth.
When reading Rauscher’s paper, nothing stands out to me as a blatant lie. So, can she really be at fault for reporting the exciting results of her experiment? If the 36 students she evaluated performed better after listening to Mozart’s sonata, why couldn’t her findings be replicated in other studies, with other subjects?
The reality is that the Mozart Effect is not a fluke. Science is facing a replication crisis, meaning that many published scientific results are not able to be subsequently reproduced, which calls into question the validity of those results. And while this trend can be attributed to a variety of reasons, the one I find most interesting protects the good intentions of scientists and instead reveals a massive pitfall in scientific training — the complete lack of understanding of statistics by science professionals.
Many specialized scientists, though esteemed in their area of expertise, lack the requisite statistical knowledge to accurately design their experiments and interpret results. Some authors may be going off of the knowledge equivalence of STATS 250. And since journals will often be peer-reviewed by their fellow biologists or psychologists, a published manuscript could have made its way to the public’s viewing escaping any rigorous statistical scrutiny. This issue of accurate statistical representation has caused enough alarm that the American Statistical Association released a statement discouraging the use of p-values, a measure commonly used to prove the significance of results, but one that is so misunderstood and misused that some suggest abandoning its use entirely. Some of the confusion comes from the interpretation of a p-value and a lack of understanding of its limits. While a value under 0.05 is generally regarded as statistically significant, there is no scientific reasoning behind this cutoff, and p-values cannot speak to the size or importance of an observed effect.
Rauscher’s 1993 study was published in Nature, a leading scientific journal. Her article has been accessed 58,000 times and cited over 600 times. In this case, I’d say that the popularization of a scientific mistruth was relatively harmless. Thousands of Georgia-born babies came home with an extra present! But that is not always the case.
The idea that vaccinations cause autism spread from an article from the 1990s, which used the incidence of autism and Measles, Mumps and Rubella vaccination in eight out of 12 children as proof for causation. Although now discredited, disproved and retracted, the damage had already been done. A large measles outbreak in 2008 in the UK was attributed to declining rates of measles vaccination in children. In 2020, almost two decades after the original publication, 10% of American adults believed that vaccines cause autism, while 46% were unsure.
Since the stakes of an optimal study plan are much lower, I say listen to music if you want to! Listen to rap, punk, classical. Bop your head to instrumental set lists or catchy lyrics. But know that any perceived benefit on your end is more based on individual experience than an all-encompassing scientific phenomenon. As for me, I will continue to use the noises of my environment as my studying soundtrack. And shockingly, sometimes those noises include the study playlist of the stranger beside me, as they listen to their music at such an ungodly volume that it spills out of their ear buds. But I don’t judge. If music helps you study, then in a way, it is helping to make you smarter. However, maybe down the road, if you ever find yourself reaching for a Babypod vagina speaker — the kind that gets inserted intravaginally — it might be best if you keep that to yourself.
Statement Columnist Molly Goldwasser can be reached at gomolly@umich.edu.
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