Daisy Fancourt on Art Cure: “If a drug had the same benefits as art, we’d take it every day”

I can pinpoint the note that started me down the path of researching the health benefits of art. I was fresh out of university, working in the NHS, running the performing arts program at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London. The pianist had just finished playing in the dementia ward and a relative of one of the patients came up to me: “What a lovely entertainment program you run”.

It was meant kindly – ​​she enjoyed the session. The thing was, I already knew that the hospital art program wasn’t just fun. Far from it. In that joint session I saw a patient who could not remember how to sing to the relatives who visited her White Cliffs of Dover and talk about your childhood. Earlier that day, I had seen a baby with burns in the trauma and emergency department who didn’t need any morphine as soon as the theater group started the show, a premature baby who cried inconsolably and refused food but calmed down and started to feed as soon as his mother started singing, and a man who had had a stroke whose gait suddenly got faster and faster when we put headphones on him. Yes, the art program was enjoyable and for many patients a welcome alternative to watching television. But every day I saw firsthand the tangible and meaningful effects art had on patients’ health. And I wanted to understand how and why these effects occur—what happens in our brains and bodies. So I left the hospital to find answers.

Since then, I have been working as a psychobiologist and epidemiologist for more than ten years, researching the influence of art on our health. And the findings from research studies—my own and others conducted around the world—are increasingly exciting. When we pick up a book, listen to a song, dance at a party, or do a craft, we activate biological processes in the body that support various aspects of our health. We to wire reward networks into our brains which increase levels of hormones such as dopamine, which are involved in mood and pleasure. We modulate the activity of our autonomic nervous systemleading to a decrease in heart rate and blood pressure over time. We experience a decrease in stress hormones in our endocrine system and inflammation in our immune system. Even us change the expression of our genesdecreasing those involved in the stress response and increasing those involved in beneficial cognitive processes such as neurogenesis.

If we can sustain regular engagement in the arts over months and years—participating in the arts or attending cultural performances and events—we can observe large-scale long-term physiological changes. We experience an increase in gray matter volume in areas of the brain involved in memory, auditory processes, and motor learning. We produces different patterns of proteins in our bodies, which are associated with improved cognitive function and a reduced risk of depression and infection. We even seem to be staying biologically “younger” longer – new studies are emerging that take advantage brain clock, epigenetic clock and the physiological clock of aging that all combine different kinds of biological data to tell us whether we age faster or slower than our chronological age, find that involvement in the arts predicts a younger biological age.

All of these changes can have a significant impact on our overall health. People who regularly engage in the arts not only have higher levels of happiness, life satisfaction, meaning and purpose in their lives, but also have a reduced risk of developing depressionchronic pain, fragility, even dementia. (And these relationships are not explained by people’s wealth, demographics, past medical history, or other aspects of their behavior and lifestyle.)

Together, these results are based on randomized controlled trials, laboratory experiments, and large-scale epidemiological analyzes that observe the effects of the arts at the population level. And parallel to this is a huge body of research testing specific arts interventions in healthcare settings for specific patient groups, from singing classes for people who have lost their speech to stroketo magic camps to improve hand function in children with cerebral palsyfor dance classes for people with Parkinson’s disease. More and more we are witnessing direct trials that suggest that art can be more more effective than some of the things we already recommend to people. Take pre-op anxiety – the music seems to have the upper hand over anti-anxiety drugs such as benzodiazepines (not to mention fewer side effects).

Of course, it’s important to be clear about the limitations. Artistic involvement is definitely not a panacea. There are plenty of examples of art even doing harm, either from deliberate weaponization or from poorly designed projects that didn’t consider issues like proper security. I dispel a number of useless myths Art Curefrom art that increases the IQ of babies to killing cancer cells. There are also many areas of the field that are still developing where we have exciting pilots but await larger trials. But it is definitely time to lift the lid on this evidence base and talk about it.

Because if a drug had the same catalog of benefits as art, we’d be telling everyone about it, fighting to get our hands on it, paying premium prices, taking it religiously every day, and investing billions in further research and development. So what is the joy of the recommendations I have presented Art Cure not for a pill or an injection, but for something as enjoyable as going to a concert, taking a dance class, or picking up a book—maybe even my book.

The author is Daisy Fancourt Art Cure: The Science of How Art Transforms Our Health (Cornerstone Press), March reading for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up to read along with us here

topics:

• health/
• New science book club