I played piano for about 10 years. What I got from that was, amongst other things, the ability to concentrate, manual dexterity, being able to process multiple tasks in parallel and also the sense of "art".

Playing music requires you to be in a second state of mind, you often have to be very concentrated, you use both your hands and your brain, a bit like when you are in a coding session.

Oh, and another thing helped a lot, to learn Perl and other computer stuff, that was learning English. But then, it might have gone the other way around: I learned English because of the computers. I've always been attracted by computers, and the urge to use and understand them drove me to learn English much faster.

I think so much could be related this way, I think the way the brain works is by doing links between things you know, and the more you know the more you can learn, and the easier any problem you will encounter will be to solve.

Guillaume