Georgia Governor Zell Miller has generated so much enthusiasm with his proposal to harness the "Mozart effect" for Georgia's newborns--that is, playing classical music to spur brain development--that he won't need public money to fund the project, his office says.

Miller, a Democrat, proposed that the state allocate $105,000 next year to buy a classical music tape or CD for every baby born in Georgia--more than 100,000 a year. "No one questions that listening to music at a very early age affects the spatial, temporal reasoning that underlies math and engineering and even chess," Miller explained to the legislature on 15 January.

His ideas about infant brain plasticity draw heavily on a February 1997 Time cover story, says press secretary Rick Dent. Miller's faith in the power of music is based on work done at the University of California, Irvine. One study, reported in Nature in 1993, found that listening to Mozart briefly raised the IQs of college students. Another (Science, 11 November 1994, p. 968) found that keyboard music lessons boosted the spatial skills of 3-year-olds.

The Irvine researchers, who were not consulted by the governor, have doubts about the plan. "None of our studies show that listening casually [as opposed to taking lessons] has any effect at all for children," says psychologist Frances Rauscher, now at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh.

Dent, however, says the governor's office has been "flooded with calls," and four recording companies have offered donations for the project. Says he, "We think we can get it up and running by April 1."