What Art Does For Your Brain

Hidden Brain

This episode of Hidden Brain explores the profound impact of art on mental and physical health, drawing from scientific research and persona

Key takeaways

• Engaging with the arts can reduce anxiety, improve mood, and even influence physical health outcomes such as feeding behavior in premature babies.

Main topics

• The therapeutic power of music, dance, and visual art
• Art as a tool in medical settings (hospitals, NICUs, dementia care)

Notable quotes

When we started singing this lullaby and she started singing along with her baby as well, the baby's behavior just completely changed. And within a couple of minutes, it was suddenly feeding again.

Conclusion

Art is not merely a source of pleasure—it is a powerful tool for healing, connection, and

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. The Old Testament tells the story of King Saul, a ruler who was frequently gripped by waves of anguish and despair. When Saul was afflicted by such torments, his advisors didn't always call for a physician or a priest. Instead, they summoned a young shepherd named David, known for his skill at playing the lyre. Speaker 2 (0:29) As the music began to play, King Saul's mind would settle and his mood would lift. For centuries, stories like this have been treated as legend, poetic, symbolic, even mystical. But do they point to something real? Today, a growing body of scientific research suggests that music, painting, dance, and storytelling do far more than entertain us. They calm our nervous systems, reshape our emotions, and even influence our physical health. This week on Hidden Brain, and in a companion story on Hidden Brain Plus, why the arts are no luxury, but rather a vital form of medicine for the mind. Speaker 2 (1:29) Think about the last time a piece of music stopped you in your tracks, or a novel kept you up late into the night, or a painting made you feel something you couldn't quite put into words. Why do these experiences feel so powerful? For a long time, scientists didn't have a clear answer. The arts seemed too subjective, too personal, to study in any systematic way. But that's starting to change. At University College London, Psychobiologist Daisy Fancourt has found that these moments are not just meaningful, they're measurable, and they can play a crucial role in our emotional and psychological well-being. Daisy Fancourt, welcome to Hidden Brain. Speaker 1 (2:10) It's lovely to be with you. Speaker 2 (2:13) Daisy, as a young woman, you were very involved in music, singing and playing the piano. What did you notice about the emotional and psychological effects that music and the arts had on you and your friends? Speaker 1 (2:26) I feel really lucky because I was born into a family of professional musicians. So the arts were just so much a part of my day-to-day upbringing. I don't think I really reflected on what a privilege that is to have that kind of exposure at such a young age. I mean, I remember so clearly that... If ever I felt stressed or worried about anything as a teenager, I used to go and play the piano just sort of instinctively. And I knew that was something that would help me. And I certainly have noticed that a lot of the relationships, the friendships that I built early on, they came through playing music with friends, being in orchestras or bands or being involved in musical theatre. So I think it was a lot more fundamental and foundational to me than I necessarily appreciated at that young age. Speaker 2 (3:18) I understand, Daisy, that while you were in college, you began working in a pediatric hospital. Tell me about this work, where it was and what you did. Speaker 1 (3:27) It was an incredible programme that was open to students at Oxford University where I was studying. And alongside your studies, you could train to go and deliver arts programmes in hospitals. And it was something I just jumped at immediately because I was still fascinated by science and medicine and keen to find a way to blend the two. So we received training and then worked in paediatric hospital wards doing singing workshops with the children. Speaker 1 (3:53) And I was just completely blown away by the impact that I saw the singing having. I kind of expected it to be a nice bit of entertainment. But actually I was seeing directly that singing with children who were really anxious and crying and distressed would stop them crying and would actually completely calm them down. Speaker 1 (4:13) And I saw these amazing interactions between patients and their siblings, that actually music was providing this form of emotional and social connection for them, even in this very challenging and kind of often inhumane kind of environments of the hospital. So I was actually able to witness the benefits I hadn't really appreciated that music could have. Speaker 2 (4:32) I understand that on one occasion you observed a premature baby in the hospital who was crying inconsolably and refusing to eat. Tell me that story. Speaker 1 (4:48) We were working in NICUs, the neonatal intensive care units, with some of the parents and actually trying to help the mothers sing with their babies. And I remember this one child who was just crying and crying and the mother was really struggling and you could see it was really impacting her psychologically as well. But as soon as we started singing this lullaby and she started singing along with her baby as well, the baby's behavior just completely changed. And within a couple of minutes, it was suddenly feeding again. Speaker 2 (5:20) I'm assuming that part of this might have also been that singing was calming the mom down and perhaps that was also sending a signal to her child. Speaker 1 (5:29) Absolutely. And this is something that we actually saw so many times across different wards, that often the parents were the ones who were the most anxious and really actually struggling the most with the situations they were in. And actually giving them a way that they could engage and play and respond with their children through singing was something that was supporting that whole family unit together. Speaker 2 (5:52) Another time you saw a child being treated for burns. He was in severe pain. What did you observe, Daisy? Speaker 1 (6:00) Well, after I finished college, I actually got a full time job working in our National Health Service. So working in hospitals, designing new arts programs. And one of the one of the wards we worked on was in the emergency departments. And I remember there was a little boy who'd come in who'd had really terrible burns and there was a delay in managing to get morphine to him. And he was calling out for pain relief. But actually, there was a theatre group that we had in the hospital and they started doing this performance for him in the emergency departments. And again, it was just this complete change in his behaviour. Speaker 2 (6:41) And was this theatrical production, was it aimed at children? Was it aimed at his age group? Speaker 1 (6:47) Yes, it was. It was from a wonderful group called Chicken Shed who specialised in how you could engage young people with the arts. And we brought them into the hospital. They'd specialised in working in disability art, but we brought them in and said, well, can we adapt this and develop programmes that would be really targeting the children who are in the hospital? And they delivered some amazing programmes across our paediatric wards. Speaker 2 (7:17) So even as you were seeing the effects that the arts were having on patients, you were also noticing that among some of your colleagues, doctors and administrators, they saw this as a form of entertainment, not as a form of therapy. Can you talk about this disconnect that you experienced, Daisy? Speaker 1 (7:35) Well, it was sort of a situation where if people didn't know what it was and you started describing it, it was sort of described as, oh, yeah, the hospital entertainment program. But actually, I noticed that as soon as we started working closely with clinicians on their wards. they actually really started to get it. They started to see this impact. Like we brought music onto the dementia wards. And immediately when we started playing these songs, there were these patients who couldn't remember their relatives, but were suddenly singing along Word Perfect. And you could see the clinicians suddenly looking up and noticing. And then we were having these great conversations where we were saying, well, how can we use this? How can we use this with the patients to support them whilst they're in hospital? Speaker 1 (8:16) So I was seeing these moment-to-moment transitions in how the arts were being perceived by the clinical staff as we started working more closely with them. But it was still at a stage where we didn't fully have the evidence to sort of say, well, that's because of... these scientific studies, that we were seeing the impact, but not always having those scientific papers to fall back on to explain it. So it really highlighted for me this gap in terms of scientific research and being able to make that case rather than having to demonstrate it physically all the time. Speaker 2 (8:53) Daisy had seen that engagement with the arts was healing people and making them whole. When we come back, we follow Daisy as she becomes a researcher. She discovers why the arts have such striking effects and how to integrate them into the practice of medicine. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. After seeing firsthand the benefits of the arts in her own life and in the lives of her patients, Daisy Fancourt became a researcher. She started to generate hard scientific evidence for the benefits of the arts on our health. Over the past couple of decades, she and others have identified distinct ways in which the arts affect our bodies and our minds. Speaker 2 (9:48) Daisy, you say that engaging with the arts can elevate our mood and increase our sense of well-being, not just in the moment, but over time. How is this happening? And do we understand the brain mechanisms behind this? Speaker 1 (10:01) It's actually one of the things people report the most when you ask them how they feel when they engage in the arts. They'll often say they feel happier. And we actually are really starting to understand more about the neuroscience of why this is. Because when we engage in the arts, we are essentially activating pleasure centres in the brain and reward networks like the dopaminergic system, which leads to the release of neurotransmitters like dopamine, which are involved in those feelings of happiness, of pleasure. And actually, we used to think that we just got these dopamine releases at the kind of peak moments of arts experiences, like if you're listening to a song and that chorus comes back and you have that kind of yes moment. Speaker 2 (10:40) But Speaker 1 (10:41) we also now know that you get those in anticipation of those moments. It's the build up to the return of that chorus. Or if you're reading a story, it's those moments when you're about to find out who the murderer is in a big detective novel, for example. And actually, that's why the arts are so effective at giving us these dopamine releases, because arts experiences are constantly about tension and resolution and anticipating what might happen and seeing if we're right or having our expectations thwarted. So essentially, when we engage in the arts, we are giving our brains these repeated doses of dopamine. And that helps us to feel. happier in the moment but also over time we see that the more regularly engaged we are the higher the levels of our happiness that we have the higher our life satisfaction and particularly if we're getting involved in doing and making arts as well it can affect so many other aspects of our well-being like our self-esteem our sense of meaning and purpose and autonomy in our lives Speaker 2 (11:38) Now, the arts evoke all kinds of different emotions. So we might, you know, watch a horror movie and feel scared, or we might listen to heavy metal and feel pumped up. How is it that these experiences can also produce feelings of happiness and peace, when in some ways the experiences themselves might seem antithetical to happiness and peace? Speaker 1 (11:57) It's true. It feels like a paradox, doesn't it? That the idea you could watch a horror movie or read a really sad book, but somehow it's still good for your well-being. And the reason for this is that when we engage in arts and in, for example, sad or scary or shocking arts experiences, we actually experience positive and negative emotions simultaneously. So if you experience those sad, scary or shocking events in real life, it would just be probably deeply traumatic. Because we know it's art, our brain treats us a little bit differently. So we've got a little bit of an aesthetic distance between us and that art experience. And that distance means that we experience those emotions, but we don't have to respond to them. We don't have to change the scary experience in our lives. We've not got to try and stop that fear. So actually, we get to contemplate it. That means our brains get to rehearse how they might regulate their emotions or think about how we might respond. in the real world. And that's actually something our brains love to do. And it's actually really good for us as well, because our brains are prediction machines. So when we engage in the arts, we're actually helping