Are smart people just naturally attracted to study art or perform music, dance, or drama? Or does early education in the art actually cause changes in the brain that develop important components of cognition? Recent findings show that there may be some significant causal relationships between arts training and the brain's ability to learn.

The Dana Foundation, an organization with interests in neuroscience, immunology, and arts education, just released a three-year study that found that early training in the arts is possibly good for your brain. Neuroscientists and psychologists at several universities have how enhanced understanding of just how the arts might improve thinking, memory, and language skills. Music education is linked with the ability to control both short-term and long-term memory, geometric representation, and development of reading skills. Dance training improves thinking through mimicry and acting classes seem to expand language. Visual arts lessons outside the classroom during childhood are linked to improved math calculations; in retrospect, I wish I had more art lessons before I took on that advanced math class in high school.

It's not a new idea that the arts can make us smarter. The notion caught fire in the 1990s when researchers showed that college students did better on certain math tests after listening to a little bit of Mozart. And while the current report from the Dana Foundation did not provide definitive theories as to how arts make us smarter, what it does ends the popular notion that people are either right- or left-brain learners. Apparently artists and scientists are not that fundamentally different and perhaps there is even an underlying connection between the cognitive processes that give rise to both arts and sciences.