The Mozart effect is the theory that listening to the music of Mozart may temporarily boost scores on one portion of an IQ test. Popular science versions of the theory make the claim that "listening to Mozart makes you smarter" or that early childhood exposure to classical music has a beneficial effect on mental development. The original study from 1993 reported a short-term (lasting about 15 minutes) improvement on the performance of certain kinds of mental tasks known as spatial reasoning, such as folding paper and solving mazes. The results were highly exaggerated by the popular press and became "Mozart makes you smart", which was said to apply to children in particular (the original study included 36 college students). These claims led to a commercial fad with Mozart CDs being sold to parents. The U.S. state of Georgia even proposed a budget to provide every child with a CD of classical music. A meta-analysis of studies that have replicated the original study shows that there is little evidence that listening to Mozart has any particular effect on spatial reasoning. The author of the original study has stressed that listening to Mozart has no effect on general intelligence. Rauscher et al. 1993 study Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw, and Catherine Ky (1993) investigated the effect of listening to music by Mozart on spatial reasoning, and the results were published in Nature. They gave research participants one of three standard tests of abstract spatial reasoning after they had experienced each of three listening conditions: the Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, K. 448 by Mozart, verbal relaxation instructions, and silence. They found a temporary enhancement of spatial-reasoning, as measured by spatial-reasoning sub tasks of the Stanford-Binet IQ test. Rauscher et al. show that the enhancing effect of the music condition is only temporary: no student had effects extending beyond the 15-minute period in which they were tested. The study makes no statement of an increase in IQ in general (because IQ was never measured). Popularization While Rauscher et al. only showed an increase in "spatial intelligence", the results were popularly interpreted as an increase in general IQ. This misconception, and the fact that the music used in the study was by Mozart, had an obvious appeal to those who valued this music; the Mozart effect was thus widely reported. In 1994, New York Times music columnist Alex Ross wrote in a light-hearted