"An interest in a performing art leads to a high state of motivation that produces the sustained attention necessary to improve performance and the training of attention that leads to improvement in other domains of cognition. [...] Correlations exist between music training and both reading acquisition and sequence learning. [...] Adult self-reported interest in aesthetics is related to a temperamental factor of openness", as reported by the Dana Arts and Cognition Consortium (with many more details and - as is the case in any serious scientific study - caveats concerning observed correlations etc.).
