Why a dose of art may be the cure for a number of society’s ailments

While developing art programs at a London hospital, Dr. Daisy Fancourt began collecting observations that would ultimately change the course of her life’s work.

She watched as a child who’d been hospitalized for burns didn’t need morphine when he was watching a theater performance, and an adult patient with dementia who couldn’t remember her relatives began to sing along perfectly to a song the pianist was playing.

“Isn’t this a lovely entertainment program?” Dr. Fancourt recalls one of the patient’s visitors saying. “I was realizing that, no, this is so much more than entertainment,” she said during a recent interview. “I’m seeing the tangible benefits this is having on people’s health.”

For Dr. Fancourt, the exchange was a catalyst. She was pursuing a degree in music at Oxford at the time, but after completing it, she transitioned to studying science. “That was one of those moments that made me want to research this, to be able to help provide more evidence that would demonstrate tangibly what I was seeing.”

Immersing herself in psychology, immunology, and statistics, she ultimately earned a PhD from University College London in psychoneuroimmunology; her thesis examined the effects of music on stress hormones and inflammatory markers across different patient groups.

Since then, she’s worked in universities and hospitals conducting clinical trials on the medical impact of the arts, to quantify the impact of the arts on the health of societies as a whole.

What she discovered during more than 15 years of research astonished her: scientific evidence that art can improve health, stave off illness and disease, and help people live longer, more fulfilling lives.

In “Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Save Lives,” Dr. Fancourt offers a comprehensive look at her findings and below, she talks more about “Art Cure.”

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

SEE MORE: Southern California romance bookstores do not want AI for Valentine’s Day

Q: You frame art as a prescription, a medicine with ingredients. Do you think using this analogy helps people understand both the gravity and the simplicity of art as a form of treatment?

I try to be clear that the arts are not a pill — I’m not proposing that we should be whittling down this sort of thing that we take and forget about, as you do with a medicine. I’m celebrating the arts for the really beautiful and inspiring activities that they are.

But I do think this analogy to medicine is relevant, because if the arts were a pill, we would all want to take it every day, and we’d be talking about it and paying a lot of money for it.

So I think it’s helpful to demonstrate when the arts are just as effective as a pill, and when they’re even more effective, like recorded music for surgery for anxiety prior to surgery, where music is more effective than benzodiazepines in reducing pre-surgical anxiety. So I think it is good to draw those parallels when they do exist, because that helps people to see quite starkly just how strong the evidence is.

Q: As I was reading, I kept thinking of that clichéd figure — the tortured artist. “Art Cure” highlights a different figure — the happy, healthy artist. Did the idea of the tortured artist drive any of your research?

The tortured artist thing is interesting because it is really a myth. It was developed largely in the 18th century, when there was a vogue for linking the arts to what, at the time, was called madness. There were even artists at the time who would pretend to be, in their words at the time, mad, because they felt it gave them this aura of genius and being on this elevated artistic plane.

What’s really interesting is when you look at the science of it, there have been some big population health studies, like in Sweden with over a million people, where they found that people with a severe mental illness are not more likely to become an artist.

We latch onto examples like Virginia Woolf, but it’s a scientific myth. Yes, there are people with severe mental illness who are artists, and there are people who are not. There’s not a causative link between them, and many people with severe mental illness say that when they’re experiencing a lot of those symptoms, it can actually be much harder to create art.

But I think it’s interesting that the myth is better known than the science behind the reality that the arts are generally good for our mental health.

Q: I read a quote from someone recently, “Art isn’t for liking; it’s for conversation.” I thought of the anecdote at the beginning of “Art Cure,” with the newspaper critic and young Daisy. The newspaper critic was unimpressed by the art, while young Daisy was captivated by the same piece. Does liking the art or disliking the art make any difference in the benefit of engaging with it, or is it the consideration and the conversation itself that’s so beneficial?

In general, it’s absolutely fine to engage with art you don’t really like. We all read books where we really hate that main character because they’re just so annoying, or they’re not behaving in the way we want them to. And that is normally quite a positive process, because it means we’re getting to respond emotionally to the art form, but if we force ourselves to engage with art we really hate, then that isn’t going to have a positive response for us.

I talk in the book about the myth that things like heavy metal music can be bad for you. Actually, the studies show that it’s not that they are bad for you, unless you actively don’t like that music, in which case, being made to listen to it can make you angrier and more frustrated. So it’s fine to have a little bit of friction in our response, and that can be a really good thing for our brains to contemplate it, but it doesn’t stand that we should be forcing ourselves into experiences we really don’t enjoy.

Stress reduction is largely going to be achieved when you do have a positive emotional response. For example, elevator music is calming, but if people don’t like it, they may find it irritating, and it doesn’t relax them. Equally, if you’re trying to increase your happiness in the moment, you want art forms you enjoy so you get your dopamine boosts. But if you are more interested in challenging your worldview, thinking differently about the world, seeking novelty, then books and other things can provide that, and that’s OK. So it’s OK to read books you don’t enjoy. I’ve just read a book in my book club that I really didn’t like, but it was so thought-provoking. I loved the discussions and the way they made me think.

Q: I was especially moved when you discussed singing to your newborn daughter when she was in the intensive care unit and seeing her subsequent improvement. Many readers might not think of a nonfiction, popular science book as rooted in the author’s personal experiences. Can you tell me about your decision to include that anecdote?

In popular science books, authors often create stories that combine elements of people’s real lives into a new fictional character because they’re worried about anonymity. I wanted to have real stories in this book because there are so many, and I feel it’s more authentic when you have those genuine voices. So I’m really lucky that all the people in the book are real people with real names, but I also acknowledge that there’s a vulnerability in putting out your story in that way, which is why I wanted to make sure that I contributed something of my own, so that it felt like an equal partnership with the other people who’d come forward and told their stories.

SEE ALSO: ‘Infinite Jest’ at 30: Why its editor says it’s ‘more valuable than ever’

Q: The current administration in the US has cut funding for so many arts programs. How do you think communities can overcome hurdles like these, and how crucial do you think it is to make that a priority?

I think there are two points here: One is that it is important that we talk about the impact that these funding cuts have, because there’s still a perception that cutting an arts budget is a kind of ideological thing that you can do based on whether or not you want to have arts in society.

But actually, the point I’m trying to make in the book is that cutting an arts budget has consequences for your health budgets and for your criminal justice budgets and for all of these other budgets. So I’m trying to make this less of an ideological position about whether you want arts in society, and more of an economic, pragmatic one about what is going to be the investment that’s going to achieve the outcomes that we want within society at the best cost. And that’s where actually investing in the arts has that economic benefit.

There’s another side, which is that, as well as hoping for top-down policy initiatives that support this, it’s really important that there are grassroots-up initiatives too. Something that’s so wonderful about the arts sector in so many countries is that it’s led by individual artists and communities, by local arts organizations, by the behaviors of individuals. And that doesn’t have to wait for policy. That’s something that people can be mobilizing and engaging with, to take part in and to share art themselves.

Q: In the age of AI and social media addiction, do you think human engagement with the arts will decline to dangerous levels?

I think it’s a risk, but I’ve got a little bit of optimism here, because I have been noticing this trend that seems to be appearing amongst young people for what they’re calling “Granny hobbies,” so things like crocheting and knitting and other things where it involves their hands, just like a screen. But I’ve seen things where they’re deliberately doing it to get off their phones, to get off their screens and into something that feels more meaningful and tactile and tangible. So there are things like that that make me feel the arts has been an enduring human behavior for hundreds of thousands of years, maybe we can have some hope that actually, people will return to this behavior more and perhaps less, for screens which have not been an enduring human behavior for hundreds of thousands of years.

But I think it’s also important that we consider the difference between art and AI that I’ve heard discussed: can you create AI-generated music that is the perfect kind of relaxation music and particularly beneficial to health? And I think that’s completely the wrong way of going about it, because our arts experiences are partly about the sensory input that we get, like the ingredients of the arts, but it’s also partly about our own modulation, our own processing of that, our own perception of that based on our personalities and our memories and our life experiences, and that’s not something that is easily generated in that way. And also, I don’t understand why we would want to have AI producing art, because surely the point of AI is to do the jobs we don’t want to do. So we get to do the really enjoyable things like art and creativity, right?

SEE ALSO: Exploring why we want our lives to matter with the author of ‘The Mattering Instinct’

Q: Do certain mediums of art engagement outweigh others in health benefits, like reading versus drawing? 

This really depends on what kind of health benefit you’re hoping for. So there are some health benefits like mental health, for example, where all kinds of arts engagement can support our mental health. But if you’re looking for something that’s going to support your mobility, then art forms like dance and music that have that rhythm, that pulse, that beat and that movement to them are particularly beneficial.

And equally, if you’re thinking about things that are going to challenge your way of thinking, your world views, help you to feel empathy with other people, then you’re going to need things that have got that narrative storyline. Or if you want things that are going to reduce loneliness, then you need art forms that are going to have that social component.

So I think it’s important for people to consider which aspect of their health they’re most interested in, and whether there’s a particular ingredient or component of arts that’s going to be important to helpto achieve that.

Q: What about digital art versus tactile?

Digital art — I call that, probably quite rudely in the book — the ultra processed food of arts engagement zones, because it does have benefits, like digital arts engagement does have a lot of benefits, but it’s interesting that in a number of the trials, the benefits are muted, or not as strong as we see from in-person, tactile engagement.

So we know that people who sing in choirs with other people in real life have stronger responses from people who sing in virtual choirs that they’re doing through their computers, and people who watch things in the cinema rather than watching plays in the theater don’t have the same cognitive benefits from the cinema that they get from the theater.

And partly, this is about the less real interactions that you get when it’s in person, and partly it’s about the screen-based nature, which is, you know, does have different effects on our brains, particularly making us into a particularly alert but quite passive brain states.

Q: Does the screen almost become a barrier to the full connection or full flow state? 

Yes, we do see a difference in how people get flow. We also see that with virtual arts engagement, such as virtual choirs or virtual book clubs, there’s greater variability in how present people feel in the moment and how genuinely connected they can feel with others.

And of course, we are losing some of those micro-interactions, like when you go to a real choir, as well as singing, you’re getting those extra things, like those little conversations that take place. You’re getting the atmosphere of the room you’re in. And those are auxiliary to the actual art itself, but they are things that are normally latched onto the vehicle of engaging in that art. So they bring extra benefits.