Improving Health and Wellbeing Outcomes, Through the Science of Art
Imagine lowering the burden and cost of chronic and degenerative diseases, mental health challenges, addiction, and trauma, through exposure to art?
Following on from our forum in February with the Institute's Health, Medicine and Society Program, the NeuroArts Blueprint was launched on 1st December in New York. It is a bold roadmap for bringing together science, the arts, and technology to build a sustainable new field that promotes individual and community health—and offers enormous benefits to all.
What is NeuroArts?
Scientific studies increasingly confirm what human beings across cultures and throughout time have long recognised: we are wired for art. The arts in all of their modalities can improve our physical and mental health, amplify our ability to prevent, manage, or recover from disease challenges, enhance brain development in children, build more equitable communities, and foster wellbeing through multiple biological systems.
What the Science Reveals
Because the brain is agile, exposure to arts of all kinds fosters interconnectivity across a vast and complex network populated by hundreds of billions of neurons, influencing how we process and perceive creative experiences. The brain systems that engage with reward, motor activity, perception, and the senses are stimulated by art in ways unmatched by anything else.
In recent years, new tools and technology have emerged to reveal and measure the complex neural mechanisms that are involved. Revolutionary advances in imaging capacities, portable devices, and wearable sensors allow us to observe how the brain changes, nanosecond by nanosecond, in response to stimuli. They help us map what happens as we take in the world through the portals of sound, sight, scent, touch, and taste.
At the core of being human, the arts are a vibrant path to health, community, and possibility.
Where to from here?
Consider the possibility of helping people recover from depression, or improve the memory in those with Alzheimer’s disease through music, or imagine movement and dance reducing the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. What if virtual reality can allow people with physical disabilities to become more mobile? Or watching theatrical performances to lessen the toll of chronic illness.
In fact, science is proving that the arts and aesthetic experiences can do all of that and more. The NeuroArts Blueprint offers a roadmap for translating those findings into asset-based action.
Take a deep dive into this fascinating body of work by watching the launch video, download the Blueprint, visit the website or sign up to be notified of the upcoming January 2022 webinar.
The Aspen Institute New Zealand has a non-partisan reputation for gathering curious minds, creatives, scholars, and members of the public to address some of the world’s most complex problems. But the goal of these convenings is to have an impact beyond the conference room. They are designed to provoke, further and improve actions taken in the world.
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