The University of California at Irvine conducted a study to improve your IQ with specific kinds of music. The study psychologists observed that participants who listened to 10 minutes of a Mozart piano sonata achieved higher scores on a test of spatial intelligence than the participants who took the test without having listened to the music.
The psychologists found, however, that when the participants listened to a different kind of music, i.e., a highly rhythmic dance piece or a hypnotic piece, no improvement in mental skills was observed.
This phenomenon appears to suggest that the complex musical composition typical in Mozart’s sonatas stimulate neural pathways that have a direct connection with mental skills. There is a growing body of science that asserts that music has a direct effect on human intelligence and can improve your IQ.
In an issue of Neurological Research, Rauscher and Shaw reported that preschoolers who studied piano performed 34% better in spatial and temporal reasoning ability than preschoolers who spent the same amount of time learning to use computers.
In the UC Irvine experiment, it was determined that people who listened to Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos (K. 488) for 10 minutes before taking a test in abstract and spatial reasoning did significantly better than those who listened to 10 minutes of relaxation instruction or who, for 10 minutes, sat in silence.
Compilations of Mozart pieces have been recorded on compact discs for the precise purpose of increasing IQ and achieving the kind of measurable IQ improvement documented in the famed University of California at Irvine study.