Insights Gained Into Arts and Smarts
Findings released this week from
three years of studies
by neuroscientists and psychologists at seven universities help amplify scientists’ understanding of how training in the arts might contribute to improving the general thinking skills of children and adults.
“We tend to think of the artist, on the one hand, and scientists and mathematicians, on the other, as fundamentally different people,” said Elizabeth S. Spelke, one of the scholars who took part in the research project. “I think the work done here suggests a much closer connection between the cognitive processes that give rise to the arts and the cognitive processes that give rise to the sciences.”
The idea that the arts, and music in particular, could make children smarter in other ways gained currency in the 1990s, after a pair of researchers published a study showing that college students performed better on some mathematical tests after listening to...
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