Force-Feeding Classical Music Does Not Make A Child Genius

In 2007, the German research ministry finally commissioned a crack team of neuroscientists, psychologists, educationalists and philosophers to investigate all the research done on the phenomenon.Their conclusion: even if listening to Mozart does boost spatial-temporal reasoning (and not all studies have shown this), the effect lasts no more than 20 minutes.A misreading of science, coupled with soaring expectations, also fuels many doomed attempts to teach foreign languages to infants. Research in the Nineties showing that babies possess a unique ability to learn any tongue sent parents scampering off to buy Berlitz tapes in the hope of turning their newborns into mini-polyglots. It didn't work.Why? Because babies tune into a language only when it is spoken to them regularly by a real person. In more recent experiments, infants exposed only to foreign language DVDs or audiotapes or bilingual toys absorbed nothing at all - not one word or phrase, not one single sound.

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