And, as study and competence in the arts reinforce one another, the joy of learning becomes real, tangible, and powerful. This competence provides a firm foundation for connecting arts-related concepts and facts across the art forms, and from them, to the sciences and humanities. For example, the intellectual methods of the arts are precisely those used to transform scientific disciplines and discoveries into everyday technology. The visual arts have gotten a tremendous boost from discoveries in neuroscience. That paradigm is wrong.
Musicians usually process melodies in their left hemispheres.
Many of our greatest scientific thinkers, like Einstein, have discussed the integration of imagination into scientific pursuit. The use of art not just to draw but to teach thinking and to build emotive expressiveness and memory has been a remarkable demonstration of the brain's plasticity. The value of music as a component of enriched learning has long been recognized in education. Many schools offer music education in gifted programs. In fact, considerable evidence suggests a broad-based music and arts education should be required for every student in the country.