Art Is the Best Medicine

Can art feel like love or work like a massage? Science says yes.

Research shows that engaging with art, whether that means visiting a museum, strumming a guitar, or painting a canvas, changes our bodies and minds for the better. Making art can reduce the stress hormone cortisol, fine-tune motor skills in patients with Parkinson’s disease, and help us live longer. We are physiologically wired to experience art in a way that transforms the complex networks of interconnected systems in our bodies, quite literally expanding our brains and abilities to process the world around us. In short, science says art is good for us.

This notion is the fitting slogan behind PST ART: Art & Science Collide, the third iteration of the Getty-led regional arts initiative, which opened this fall. Getty and partner organizations across Southern California funded with Getty grants are presenting an array of thematically related exhibitions and public programs centered on links between art, science, and technology in the past, present, and imaginable future.

Goodbye Rogaine, Hello Art?

Residents of Los Angeles and the surrounding region will likely encounter PST ART posters, billboards, and Metro TAP cards asking playful questions about how art can improve health and wellness, from reducing tension and pain and calming the mind to even saving one’s hairline. The approach is light-hearted but based on real research, meetings with members of the medical community, and a national convening that included US Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy, all of which confirm the idea that art is good for us.

In a talk for a National Endowment for the Arts summit earlier this year, Murthy stated that the arts are just as important as the sciences in boosting well-being, due largely to the instantaneous positive effects they have on the nervous system. Art can help us strengthen social connections, relieve loneliness, enhance imagination and inspiration, and tap into healing effects for both the mind and body—all things Murthy says can help us build healthier and more connected communities.

Go Ahead and Get Lost

So, what exactly happens when someone interacts with art?

Exposure to art and enriched environments engages not only our brains but also a vast physiological network. Our immune, endocrine, circulatory, and respiratory systems and cognitive, emotional, and higher brain functions like creativity and memory all come into play through neuroplasticity. “Neuroplasticity is the way our brains change, building neural pathways and modifying structural and functional changes in response to different stimuli,” says Susan Magsamen, MAS, executive director of the International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “Arts are a very powerful, salient stimuli that have the ability to change your brain and how you feel and see the world.”

Here’s how it works. When we look at visual art, what we see goes through our eyes to the back of the brain (to the occipital lobe, to be precise) to process what we are seeing. Because our bodies are mostly water, we can also feel vibrations of an artwork’s solid mass and any sounds or sensorial cues. The more time we spend viewing, and really contemplating, an artwork, the more connections our brain makes to other physiological and emotional systems, enabling us to actually feel effects on multiple levels.

Magsamen views the museum as an ultimate enriched environment, ideal for sparking curiosity and engaging us in discovery through exhibitions and related programming like art making, audio tours, and lectures. “Museums hold extraordinary collections that offer people opportunities to explore so many different aspects of themselves, their communities, and their feelings,” she says. “There’s light and sound, and sometimes scent, texture, and visual and tactile cues. These varied aesthetic experiences make us feel differently. We change in these spaces. They are places to behold the sublime.”

Multisensory experiences leave a stronger mark on our brains and the way we view things. They also have the power to quiet the mind, allowing us to “get lost” in art. “An immersive experience transforms us and takes us someplace else,” Magsamen says. “When you come back, you come back to the same place, but you’re never the same person. That’s what the catharsis experience of art does to you.”