Art has the power to change your brain, decrease your stress and improve your overall well-being.
This is part one of a double response article I was inspired to write after reading Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross. If you haven’t already, you can read part two of my blog post here: The Case for Arts as Medicine.
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As an artist, I’ve been personally aware of art’s capacity to affect mood and emotions practically all of my life. Art has been my go-to source of joy and peace since I was a child, and over time it has become a meditative practice that I use to keep myself centered.
I’ve also witnessed the strong reactions my work has elicited from buyers over the years, some even being brought to tears.
It’s only recently that I’ve become aware that our brains can be physically remodeled by aesthetic experiences and that this neurological sculpting can take place and continue well beyond childhood. This means that you’re never too old to develop an appreciation for the arts or the capacity to be creative.
This is heartening to know as I stumble my way through attempting to learn how to play the cello as an adult.
To deep dive into the subject, I picked up an excellent book on aesthetics and neuroplasticity called Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us. Even as someone who has been a lifelong creative, I found this piece of literature thoughtful and insightful. It deepened my appreciation for my craft and my understanding of why and how people react to aesthetic stimulation.
In this blog, I cover a few topics from the book I found most interesting. If you’ve ever wondered why you have an immediate attraction to a specific style of art or if the arts actually have the capacity to heal, read on. I also highly suggest you go and snag a copy of the book yourself.
We Are Hardwired to Appreciate Art
As we travel through life, things we’re exposed to leave a biological imprint. This means that what you absorb, good or bad, has the power to change you not just psychologically and emotionally but physically. This includes the arts and all variety of aesthetic experiences.
Thanks to the work of Marian Diamond, scientists have known since the 1960s that our brains can be physically altered by the richness or impoverished state of the environments in which we live, work, and play. This awareness has given rise to a relatively new field of study that looks deeply into our biological relationship with creativity. What this research is revealing is that art improves and empowers us as a species, and in its absence, we’re diminished.
It’s not by accident that children who’ve had early exposure to art and music tend to outpace their less advantaged peers. It’s also not incidental that when one culture seeks to subjugate or wipe out another, they target the arts for destruction. Like finely tuned instruments, we’re hardwired to sympathetically respond to audio, visual, and tactile stimulation, and the nature of that response defines our individual taste and aesthetic mindset.
Experiencing Art Is Like Falling In Love
Experiencing art, whether you’re making it or consuming it, triggers the release of a range of neurochemicals, hormones, and endorphins. This responsiveness allows us to reach varying degrees of euphoria and catharsis or neutrality and inner peace.
As an example, there are songs I can listen to and have what I feel is a religious experience. Because these particular pieces of music have such a strong impact on me, I can’t have them playing as background music when I’m trying to concentrate on work because they are far too distracting, and the music wins the battle for my complete attention.
When experiencing art that deeply pleases us, feel-good hormones, dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin, are released in our frontal cortex producing a psychological state similar to falling in love. These are also the same neurochemicals that flood our system after imbibing good food, certain drugs, or alcohol.
Regularly consuming and creating art can increase our resistance to stress and improve our quality of life. A London study from the University of Westminster found that gallery visitors’ cortisol levels decreased significantly after simply taking a 35-minute stroll through the gallery. In yet another study, participants who engaged in 45 minutes of art-making had a marked reduction in stress hormone levels.
Why Pink Is Your Favorite Color, but Not Mine
Our response to artistic stimulation is as unique and differentiated as a fingerprint. While we basically all have the same material to allow us to participate in art appreciation, how we process and interpret aesthetic stimuli is the result of biology and our individual lived experiences.
This explains why for one person, the color purple may be associated with Easter Mass and the scent of frankincense burning in a brass thurible. While for someone else, the same color may stir up nostalgic memories of attending their first Prince concert.
How a personal aesthetic moment works was first theorized in 2014 by Anjan Chatterjee, Professor of Neurology, Psychology, and Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. In an effort to define how your unique taste and response to art functions, he and his colleagues devised a model called the “Aesthetic Triad.” The triad involves three crucial parts of your brain’s architecture:
- Sensory Motor System
- Reward Systems
- Cognitive Knowledge and Meaning Making
The Aesthetic Triad is visually depicted as a Venn diagram, with each circle representing one of the three components.
- Sensory – What information enters your brain
- Reward – The neurostructure that releases pleasure chemicals in your brain in response
- Knowledge – Your personal history, culture, and value system
There are universally coded responses to types of aesthetic stimuli, like how one culture interprets specific colors versus another culture, but our distinct involuntary life journeys (where you grew up, how you were raised, etc.), as well as what we choose to absorb (social media, books, music, etc.) all play a role in defining what we call our artistic taste.
In Your Brain on Art, our capacity to be moved by art is referred to as a “Aesthetic Mindset,” and the book’s authors even offer a quiz to quantify it. Take the test here if you’re curious about where you fall on the scale. Whatever your outcome, remember that your Aesthetic Mindset can be cultivated and improved due to the beauty of neuroplasticity.
Art Can Reshape Our Brains
In the late 1990s, neurobiologist Semir Zeki coined “Neuroesthetics” as an offshoot of neuroplasticity research. Neuroplasticity simply refers to the brain’s ability to change based on environmental stimuli. Neuroaesthetics, also often called Neuroarts, focuses on the measurable changes art can have on our brain, body, and behavior.
Our bodies are constantly reacting to the world around us. We have roughly 100 billion neurons in our brains, making us highly capable of calculation, perception, and learning. As we encounter new stimuli, like works of art, our neurons excitedly communicate with one another, creating new pathways or synapses that form the foundation for how we build memories and engage with our environments.
It was Marian Diamond who proved the cerebral cortex actually thickens in response to environmental stimuli. New synaptic pathways will form and strengthen over time depending on what factors the brain is regularly exposed to. Our brains are also in a continuous process of pruning synapses that weaken from lack of use. In this way, our nervous system is constantly being remodeled for maximum efficiency to match our environment.
The old axiom “use it or lose it” is definitely fitting here. However, the longer you engage in a particular activity, the more deeply embedded a synapse pathway becomes. This synapse-building feature can malfunction under certain circumstances, such as in cases of extreme trauma, addiction, or hormone disruption.
Neuroaesthetics is concerned with capitalizing on the brain’s plasticity and our innate capacity for art appreciation to develop applied therapies that advance health, healing, and well-being. Thankfully, more and more people, including professional care providers, are recognizing that intentional engagement in the arts isn’t an exotic style of therapy but a fundamental tool for gaining a better quality of life.
You can read about it in part two of this blog post, The Case for Arts as Medicine.
