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

I can find the exact comment that made me want to embark on a career researching the health benefits of art. I was fresh out of university, working in the NHS and running the performing arts program at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London. A pianist had just finished playing in the dementia ward and a relative of a patient came up to me: “What a wonderful entertainment program you run”.

It was meant kindly – ​​she had enjoyed the session. The thing was, I already knew that the hospital’s art program wasn’t just entertainment. Far from it. In that sing-along session, I had seen a patient who could not remember the relatives who visited her sing with words-perfect to The White Cliffs of Dover and chat away afterwards about her childhood. Earlier that day, I had seen a child with burns in the emergency room who had not needed morphine when the theater group started their performance, a premature baby who cried inconsolably and refused food but calmed down and began to eat the moment his mother began to sing, and a man who had suffered a stroke whose walking movements suddenly increased head speed and threw off symmetry. Yes, the art program was enjoyable, and a welcome alternative for many patients to television viewing. But I saw firsthand, every day, the tangible, meaningful effects the arts had on patients’ health. And I wanted to understand how and why these effects happened – what was going on inside our brains and bodies. So I left the hospital to find the answers.

For over a decade now, I have been working as a psychobiologist and epidemiologist, researching the impact of art on our health. And the findings from research studies – mine and others conducted around the world – are becoming more and more exciting. When we pick up a book, listen to a song, dance at a party or engage in a craft activity, we activate biological processes throughout the body that support various aspects of our health. We engage reward networks in our brains that increase levels of hormones such as dopamine that are involved in mood and pleasure. We modulate the activity of our autonomic nervous system, which leads to reductions over time in heart rate and blood pressure. We experience reductions in levels of stress hormones in our endocrine system and inflammation in the immune system. We even change the expression of our genes, reducing those involved in stress response and increasing those involved in beneficial cognitive processes such as neurogenesis.

If we can maintain regular engagement in the arts over months and years—participating in the arts or attending cultural performances and events—we can see extensive physiological changes over the longer term. We experience increases in the volume of gray matter in areas of the brain involved in memory, auditory processes and motor learning. We produce different patterns of proteins in our body that are linked to improved cognitive function, and reduced depression and risk of infection. We even seem to stay biologically “younger” longer—new studies just emerging using brain clocks, epigenetic clocks, and physiological aging clocks that all combine different types of biological data to tell us whether we’re aging faster or slower than our chronological age find that arts engagement predicts younger biological age.

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

These results have collectively come from randomized controlled trials, laboratory experiments, and large-scale epidemiological analyzes that observe population-level effects of the arts. And they parallel a huge body of research testing specific arts interventions in health care for specific patient groups, from singing classes for people who have lost their speech after a stroke, to magic clays to improve hand function for children with cerebral palsy, to dance classes for people with Parkinson’s disease. Increasingly, we’re seeing head-to-head trials that suggest the art might even be more more effective than some of the things we already recommend to people. Take pre-operative anxiety – music seems to have the advantage over anti-anxiety drugs like benzodiazepines (not to mention fewer side effects).

Of course, it is important to be clear about the limitations. Art engagement is definitely not a panacea. There are many examples of art even doing harm, either as a result of deliberate weaponization or from poorly designed projects that have not properly considered issues such as protection. I expose a whole series of useless myths Art Curefrom art that increases the IQ of babies to killing cancer cells. There are also many areas in this field that are still in development, where we have exciting pilots, but which await larger trials. But the time definitely feels right 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 it, paying premium prices, taking it religiously every day, investing billions in further research and development. So, what a pleasure that the recommendations I put forward in Art Cure is not for a pill or injection, but instead for something as enjoyable as going to a gig, joining a dance class or picking up a book – maybe even my book.

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