(from businessweek: The hype continued even after 20 later studies discredited the original research.)

No More Mozart
By Susan Garland

Visit any Web site hawking educational toys and you're likely to find Mozart CDs. The sales pitch: Listening to Wolfgang Amadeus makes children smarter. Never mind that the 1993 seminal study indicating a relationship between Mozart and spatial intelligence made claims only for college students. So why did it unleash a frenzy, resulting in pregnant women playing Mozart tapes to their unborn babies? Chip Heath, an associate professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Swiss psychologist Adrian Bangerter traced the evolution of what they call a "scientific legend" in a recent study.

The clamor grew out of an experiment at the University of California at Irvine that showed college students who listened to a Mozart sonata for 10 minutes temporarily improved their spatial reasoning. Heath and Bangerter analyzed hundreds of news stories over the next decade and discovered that the coverage distorted the findings by linking Mozart listening to long-term intelligence gains among infants, children, and high school students. The hype continued even after 20 later studies discredited the original research. Their conclusion: The "Mozart Effect" idea persisted because it counteracted anxiety over public education.