The Emotional Learner

Can listening to Mozart make you better at mathematics?

Can learning a musical instrument make you cleverer?

We know from studies that some types of learning, such as learning a foreign language or how to play a musical instrument, can slow cognitive decline in later life. But what is their impact on learning more generally?

The Mozart effect

Back in the 1990s the Mozart effect was one of the most talked about scientific discoveries in town. It all started with an article in the journal Nature, on the academias most respected publications. The premise was that playing Mozart to babies increased their IQ. What followed was a plethora of CDs with titles like ‘Mozart for Babies’ and an eager procession of parents prepared to be parted from their cash.

Generally, that which seems too good to be true, probably is, and subsequent studies have failed in their attempts to replicate the original. No, Mozart won’t make you baby smarter.

But why might it?

In the learning sciences, we call this potential effect far transfer. Transfer refers to the potential of one task to enhance enhance learning in another. It comes in two varieties: near transfer, and far transfer. Near transfer if the most straightforward of the two, in that learning related tasks can then help with both. For example, we can apply what we learned in a mathematics class to workplace situations. Teaching and learning relies heavily on near transfer for progression, but the tasks are alway similar.

Far transfer, on the other hand, involves unrelated learning tasks or experiences. So, listening to Mozart helping us to solve algebraic equations. 

What about playing a musical instrument?

Does learning to play a musical instrument lead to higher academic achievement? If we an prove that it does, then this would be a good example of far transfer.   

A 2016 study led by Professor Susan Hallam at the Institute of Education, UK, found that school students who played a musical instrument also obtained higher GCSE grades than those who didn’t (GSCE exams are the standard test of assessment in England and Wales, taken by most young people at 15 and 16 years of age). Does this then mean that there is something magical about music education that carries over to other areas such as maths and science? 

First we need to note that this, and other similar studies, are correlational. This means that one thing (in this case playing a musical instrument) appears to be related to another thing (exam results). This doesn’t prove that the first thing directly causes the second, what we call causation. Indeed, Hallam suggests that this is more likely due to higher levels of motivation in those students who learned a musical instrument, and next to nothing to do with direct cognitive changes.

 Anyone who’s learned to play an instrument will know it takes determination and when I picked up the guitar for the first time I didn’t think I was ever going to learn anything. I would struggle with remembering the chords and changing from one chord to another, and I hated scales. I have by no means mastered the guitar, but I’ve at least managed to learn something. People who stick with it can be thought of motivated, determined and resilient to setbacks, important skills for all types of learning.

If we can prove that music education has a direct cognitive-based effect on learning generally, this might provide some evidence for far transfer, but, as Hallam concludes, there are other possibilities. 

Franziska Degé of the Department of Music, Max Planck Institute in Germany isn’t ready to give up on far transfer just yet. Degé is interested in how far transfer might (the emphasis here being on ‘might’) be possible and draws attention to ‘some small but interesting transfer effects of music on cognitive ability.’ It could, Degé argues, be related to the multimodal integration, where music making relies on multiple sensory modalities and the ‘simultaneous integration of multi sensory information’ (e.g. auditory, visual, and somatosensory) needed to monitor progress and success. When we learn a music instrument, we engage several functions – we have to listen to the sound, watch what our limbs are doing, and be aware of how the instrument feels. We have to do several things at once and fully attend to the task.

Train your brain

What about brain training? Do the games you play to sharpen your cognitive skills make a difference to how well you learn across multiple unrelated topics? According to a 2022 paper by Fernand Gobet of the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Giovanni Sala of the University of Liverpool, there is no overall effect of cognitive training on far transfer. The study used meta-analysis, whereby the researchers looked at lot of studies carried out by others over time and drew conclusions from them using statistical methods. They suggest that examining near transfer is perhaps a more worthwhile route, whereby skills learned in a specific domain can be used within the same of similar domains, such as learning algebra to improve our understanding of geometry, or even structural engineering. Far transfer may not exist at all, at least according to some researchers. 

Researchers like Gobet and Sala are more cautious, suggesting that far transfer rarely occurs. This is bad news for those of us who have spent hours doing puzzles and downloading apps in an attempt to make ourselves smarter. Certainly, some puzzles can help, but only for related tasks, so crosswords are going to help with our language skills and Soduko with our numeracy, although more generalised benefits have also been reported, such as problem solving skills, attention and memory. Generally, however, brain training games will only make you better at brain training games. 

Is far transfer real?

I’m going to stick my neck out a little here and say there is no convincing evidence to support the existence of far transfer. The outcomes we do see are most likely due to other factors (we may call these non-cognitive factors, but I’m not keen on the phrase). These factors most likely relate to traits or study habits that can be honed through, for example, learning to play a musical instrument. We could also suggest that people who are willing to try out so-called brain training apps have an interest in learning more successfully, so the use of the app is a by-product of this curiosity and openness rather than a direct attempt to become smarter. There’s little evidence that brain training alone actually makes us smarter, at least not as far as things currently stand.