08/07/2015
Music Lessons Enhance IQ
E. Glenn Schellenberg
+ Author Affiliations
University of Toronto at Mississauga, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada
Glenn Schellenberg, Department of Psychology, University of Toronto at Mississauga, Mississauga, ON, Canada L5L 1C6; e-mail: [email protected].
Abstract
The idea that music makes you smarter has received considerable attention from scholars and the media. The present report is the first to test this hypothesis directly with random assignment of a large sample of children (N = 144) to two different types of music lessons (keyboard or voice) or to control groups that received drama lessons or no lessons. IQ was measured before and after the lessons. Compared with children in the control groups, children in the music groups exhibited greater increases in full-scale IQ.
