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President Gordon B. Hinckley has repeatedly stressed the importance of getting an education. Here is one quote that I like:

Be smart. You are all in school. Do not waste your time. This is a time of great opportunity that you will never have again as long as you live. Make the most of it right now. It is wonderfully challenging. It is hard, it is tough, isn’t it? But what a wonderful thing to go and learn of all the accumulated knowledge of all the centuries of time. Go on to college or whatever school, vocational school, whatever your choice is, but take advantage of every opportunity that you have because the Lord has laid upon you a mandate through revelation to the Prophet Joseph Smith concerning not only spiritual learning but secular learning. Yours is the responsibility, and you can’t afford to waste your time. There is so much to learn. Be smart. Give it the very best that you have.

Source: Discourses of President Gordon B. Hinckley, Vol. 1, pp. 395-396

If you were to walk across a typical university campus, you would most likely see many students with little white iPod earphones, listening to music. It is nearly impossible to ride public transportation without seeing someone listening to their portable music device. Just about everywhere you go, people listening to music. Music has found its role in just about every aspect of modern life. From television programming to shopping establishments, music has the potential to influence our moods and behaviors (Bruner 94).

Flooding our environment with tunes everywhere, music has the potential to influence our intellectual development. Can particular listening habits increase our intelligence? This question was made famous by a 1993 article in Nature magazine titled “Music and Spatial Task Performance” by university professors Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw, and Katherine Ky. They presented research results that suggest that, after listening to Mozart, college students increased their scores on spatial sub-tests in the Stanford-Binet IQ test (611). The spatial sub-tests measure a person’s ability to reason and mentally manipulate shapes and figures. In their research, students listened to about ten minutes of Mozart’s Piano Sonata, and subsequently scored eight to nine IQ points higher on spatial tests taken within ten minutes of music listening. Students did not improve in IQ tests taken later than fifteen minutes after listening to Mozart, nor they did they improve their IQ tests after sitting in silence or listening to relaxation instructions (Hetland 105).
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