Does Arts Training Make People Smarter?

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

Are Smart People Drawn To The Arts Or Does Arts Training Make People Smarter?

ScienceDaily (Mar. 6, 2008) — Learning, Arts, and the Brain, a study three years in the making, is the result of research by cognitive neuroscientists from seven leading universities across the United States. In the Dana Consortium study, researchers grappled with a fundamental question: Are smart people drawn to the arts or does arts training make people smarter?
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Children motivated in the arts develop attention skills and strategies for memory retrieval that also apply to other subject areas.
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4. In children, there appear to be specific links between the practice of music and skills in geometrical representation, though not in other forms of numerical representation.