I’ve kinda believed this for a while…but Scientific American has published a quick little article describing a paper in Brain and Cognitionwhich confirms it. The found that musicians were more creative…as defined by being able to find alternative uses for household objects. On average, they came up with 14 more uses than nonmusicians could.
I’ve always believed that music was a fundamental abstraction of patterns and pattern recognition. And to me, thats kinda what creativity and intelligence are…the ability to understand and exploit underlying patterns.