Arts and smarts

"Learning, Arts and the Brain," a Dana Arts and Cognition Consortium study by neuroscientists at seven U.S. universities, suggests that "[c]hildren motivated in the arts develop attention skills and strategies for memory retrieval that also apply to other subject areas," Science Daily reports:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080304150459.htm

"We now have further reasons to believe that training in the arts has positive benefits for more general cognitive mechanisms," says Dr. Michael S. Gazzaniga of the University of California at Santa Barbara, who led the research.

Gazzaniga's summary from the Dana Foundation website:

http://www.dana.org/news/publications/detail.aspx?id=11528