How art benefits the brain

by Grant Eckert

Many people question the purpose of art. They acknowledge an aesthetic approach but ignore any possible positive benefits of a more practical nature. Contrary to popular belief, art is not purely aesthetic. It is not a product with no possible effects outside of the obvious - an "artistic" product. Art is not of less use than science in preparing individuals for the "real" world. In fact, the contrary is true. Art is very important in helping the brain reach its full potential.

How does art accomplish this? It introduces the brain to diverse cognitive skills that help us unravel intricate problems. Art activates the creative part of our brain - the part that works without words and can only express itself non-verbally. Art, in thought and through the creative processes, activates the imaginative and creative side, the spatial and intuitive side of our brain. Art jumps over the process of linear and logical thinking. It trains the brain to shift into thinking differently, of broaching old problems in new ways. This is what makes art so important. It benefits the brain by training it to think outside the box. It helps children understand concepts with greater ease. It aids children in getting better grades. In the real world, the artistic side of the brain helps engineers solve problems. It guides individuals to create solutions. Art is the property of fine artists; it is also the product of engineers, technicians and computer designers. Art, in many different ways, helps people make the world a better place.

There have been copious studies on the relationship between art and its benefits to the brain. Semir Zeki, a former professor of neurobiology at the University College, London and co-head of the Wellcome Department of Cognitive Neurology, published an article, "Artistic Creativity and the Brain," in Science Magazine, in July 2001. Zeki detailed the relationship between the development of cognitive abilities and the creative process. He stated artistic expression is the key to comprehending ourselves. He also considered art and its expression as an expansion of brain function. In other words, art helps the brain in its search for knowledge.

Teachers apply this in the classroom, helping children improve their cognitive capabilities and stretch their ability to solve difficult problems. Professional therapists have also embraced art as another tool in their arsenal of leading the brain-weary back to health. In fact, several psychiatrists and psychologists highly recommend this form of treatment. Furthermore, training is now in place to ensure the standards remain high in this developing field.

Art therapy is now a common means of helping individuals to improve and enhance the physical, mental and emotional well-being. It bases its approach on the belief that the creative process involved in artistic self-expression helps people in a number of different positive ways. It facilitates them in ending or finding a solution to various conflicts and problems. Art also aids them to manage their behavior, develop interpersonal skills, increase self-esteem and self-awareness, lessen stress and attain insight.

Professionals use art therapy with children, adults and teens, individuals and groups. It is employed regardless of age or gender. Combining the areas of human development, visual arts such as painting, drawing and sculpture, and the creative process with the various models of counseling and psychotherapy, art therapy assesses and treats the following mental problems and disorders: anxiety, depression, mental illness, substance abuse and other addictions. Art therapists address family and relationship issues, abuse and domestic violence and social and emotional difficulties related to disability and illness. Art therapy is applicable in situations of trauma and loss, physical, cognitive, and neurological problems and psychosocial difficulties related to medical illness.

So what are the benefits of art on the brain? When individuals create art and reflect on it, the processes, increase self-awareness, initiate awareness of others and help people cope with stress, and traumatic experiences. Art enhances cognitive abilities and provides individuals with the ability to enjoy the life-affirming pleasures of making art. This is what makes art so important.

From Self-help-healing-arts-journal

The Healing Power of Music

"An unconventional approach to recovery and coping, music therapy is a field of medicine capturing new attention due to its role in helping Gabrielle Giffords recover from a gunshot. Correspondent Spencer Michels reports on the versatility of music in a medical setting, but the difficulty of quantifying its effectiveness."

Watch The Healing Power of Music on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

Info acceed at PBS NewsHour

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3º Encontro Internacional Saúde com Arte

O EISA, Encontro Internacional Saúde com Arte, é um espaço de reflexão e formação em torno do papel terapêutico que a Arte em geral, e a Música muito em particular, têm para o Ser Humano.

Promovido pela SAMP – Sociedade Artística Musical dos Pousos, coloca o ambiente hospitalar e a primeira infância como eixos prioritários de intervenção, abrindo-se contudo a outras populações alvo dos programas SAMP, como os idosos, doentes mentais e reclusos.

Depois de abordagens aos projetos Europeus mais significativos de música em ambiente hospitalar nas edições anteriores, em 2012 a SAMP abre as portas às experiências mais consolidadas nos Estados Unidos, com a presença do Serviço de Música e Medicina do Departamento de Cirurgia do Hospital de Massachusetts em Boston. Também dos EUA, da Northwestern University, estará representado o trabalho de um dos mais prestigiados laboratórios de Neurociência auditiva. O encontro decorrerá a 29 e 30 Março, em Leiria (Pousos) e terá como temática Sinapses e Emoções do Som. Porquê a música?

O EISA é dirigido a todos os profissionais com interesse pela relação Arte e Saúde. Inicialmente concebido para os profissionais SAMP envolvidos em programas de âmbito terapêutico, o EISA tem hoje como destinatários artistas e profissionais de saúde, educadores e professores de ensino especial, médicos, músicos, enfermeiros, assistentes sociais e animadores socioculturais. Está igualmente aberto a estudantes de qualquer uma das áreas anteriores.

Mais informação em 3º Encontro Internacional Saúde com Arte

Music therapy is making breakthroughs

Machover, an intriguing futurologist as well as an inventive composer, runs the departments in hyper-instruments (acoustical instruments given spiffy electronic features) and opera of the future at MIT's ultra-high-tech Media Lab. Last week, he was at UC Santa Barbara to speak on "Music, Mind and Health: Diagnosis, Treatment, and Well-being through Active Sound," one of four lectures he's given recently at the university's Sage Center for the Study of the Mind.

Music, Machover said, touches on just about every aspect of cognition. There are theories that music exists to exercise the mind and to help coordinate its separate functions. Music lovers intuitively know what researchers have verified, that music modulates our moods, helps us move, stimulates our language skills, strengthens our memories and can wondrously bring about emotional responses without their bothersome consequences.

The practical applications of music for healing are irresistible. Cutting-edge music therapy can help Parkinson's patients walk, enables the autistic to rehearse their emotions and provides opportunities for stroke victims to regain speech and motor movement. Music is usually the last thing Alzheimer's sufferers recognize. It is our final way to communicate with them, and now it seems music can play a significant role in forestalling Alzheimer's.

But that's not all. In an inspiring feedback loop, Machover and his MIT minions, which include some of the nation's most forward-looking graduate students, are applying their musical gadgets to therapy. The process of making remarkable restorative advances is changing how they think about and make music.

And that could affect how the rest of us might think about and make music in the not-so-distant future.It all began with Hyperscore, a program Machover developed to enable children to compose by drawing and painting on a monitor. A sophisticated computer program translates their artwork into a musical score.

Machover's team took Hyperscore to Tewksbury Hospital outside of Boston, which serves patients with severe physical and mental disabilities, and also includes the homeless. The residents, many of whom were physically unable to communicate or were otherwise uncommunicative, discovered their inner composer. Through Hyperscore they found they could express themselves in a way that bypassed language.

A few patients with hopeless prognoses and no meaningful life had significant enough changes in their pathology that they could actually think about at least partial recovery. Some found a decrease in auditory and visual hallucinations. There were behavior changes in many that allowed for socialization.

Dan Ellsey became the model patient. Born with cerebral palsy and unable to speak, he was forced to communicate with a headset that pointed to letters to spell out words. He had little control of his body movements. He was in his early 30s, had never been more than five miles from where he was born and seemed doomed to spend a cocooned life in the hospital.The Media Lab scientists designed a more refined headset for Ellsey that not only inspired him to compose (he turned out to have interesting musical ideas) but even allowed him to perform by controlling tempo, loudness and articulation. He blossomed, and Ellsey, while still a severely affected cerebral palsy patient, has become an active participant in the Hyperscore program, performing, making CDs and teaching other patients. He was a star at the 2008 TED conference.

What this work with music therapy has shown Machover and other researchers is the potential for what he has dubbed "personal" music. This will be a music tailored to an individual's needs, be it medicinal or simply a matter of taste.Traditionally what a composer has done, Machover explains, is to create a piece that will reach the largest number of people. But as our knowledge of how music affects our bodies and minds grows, the opportunity will arise when a piece of music can be designed specifically for your life experiences, needs and moods. A piece can even be made to change over time as you change.

Info at Los Angeles Times

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Music Training Has Biological Impact on Aging Process

By Wendy Leopold

Age-related delays in neural timing are not inevitable and can be avoided or offset with musical training, according to a new study from Northwestern University. The study is the first to provide biological evidence that lifelong musical experience has an impact on the aging process.

Measuring the automatic brain responses of younger and older musicians and non-musicians to speech sounds, researchers in the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory discovered that older musicians had a distinct neural timing advantage.

“The older musicians not only outperformed their older non-musician counterparts, they encoded the sound stimuli as quickly and accurately as the younger non-musicians,” said Northwestern neuroscientist Nina Kraus. “This reinforces the idea that how we actively experience sound over the course of our lives has a profound effect on how our nervous system functions.” Kraus, professor of communication sciences in the School of Communication and professor of neurobiology and physiology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, is co-author of “Musical experience offsets age-related delays in neural timing” published online in the journal “Neurobiology of Aging.”

“These are very interesting and important findings,” said Don Caspary, a nationally known researcher on age-related hearing loss at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine. “They support the idea that the brain can be trained to overcome, in part, some age-related hearing loss.”

“The new Northwestern data, with recent animal data from Michael Merzenich and his colleagues at University of California, San Francisco, strongly suggest that intensive training even late in life could improve speech processing in older adults and, as a result, improve their ability to communicate in complex, noisy acoustic environments,” Caspary added.

Previous studies from Kraus’ Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory suggest that musical training also offset losses in memory and difficulties hearing speech in noise -- two common complaints of older adults. The lab has been extensively studying the effects of musical experience on brain plasticity across the life span in normal and clinical populations, and in educational settings.

However, Kraus warns that the current study’s findings were not pervasive and do not demonstrate that musician’s have a neural timing advantage in every neural response to sound. “Instead, this study showed that musical experience selectively affected the timing of sound elements that are important in distinguishing one consonant from another.”

The automatic neural responses to speech sounds delivered to 87 normal-hearing, native English-speaking adults were measured as they watched a captioned video. “Musician” participants began musical training before age 9 and engaged consistently in musical activities through their lives, while “non-musicians” had three years or less of musical training.

Info at NorthWestern University

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Dance helped girl diagnosed with autism to find a voice

Most parents would not bat an eyelid if their young son or daughter asked them to sit down and watch a DVD together. But when Katreena Duffin's daughter Shannon, who has been diagnosed with autism, bounded up and asked just this, the mum of three struggled to hold back tears.

For the pretty 12-year-old was mute and had never once started a conversation. Here, Katreena, 35 – who has recently moved to Swindon with husband Derek, 36, a surveyor, and their other children Paige, six, and Ian, 17 – tells Helen Gilbert the incredible story of how starring in a dance DVD helped Shannon find a voice.

"Shannon was born with lots of difficulties. She had no muscle tone and, as a toddler, she did not walk or speak — she could only make noises. At 12 months old, she would line pegs up in colour order. She could not tell you the order they were in because she could not speak but the pegs would line up from one side of the room to the other. It was heartbreaking not being able to engage with my daughter and I craved that connection. She lived in her own little world."

When Shannon was eight years old, doctors diagnosed autism, and she was moved from a mainstream school to Hillingdon Manor — an independent specialist school in Middlesex for autistic children aged three to 19.

"It was a godsend. They gave her one–to-one help with reading, speech and language, which helped, but she was still very muddled and there was a lot of gobbledygook and she still refused to start a conversation. Shannon was also very shy and found it difficult to integrate with others. Having been bullied at mainstream school, her confidence and self-esteem were very low. At home, she would spend most of her time alone in her room playing computer games. Sometimes she would go on the Xbox with her dad — but there would never be any conversation."

"Then, four months ago, Anna Kennedy — Hillingdon Manor's founder who has two autistic sons herself — asked Shannon if she would like to appear in a dance DVD with other children from the school. I was not sure how well Shannon would take to it. Physically, she had very weak muscle tone and no co-ordination at all."

"But Anna spent a lot of time researching moves and worked with dance experts from the Pineapple Performing Arts School in London. She helped the children develop their spatial awareness — something that is difficult for autistic children to grasp — and ensured the children worked in groups and pairs. She encouraged the kids to use imagination by entering a circle and dancing freestyle to the music and urged them to bring in their favourite CDs to help them get used to the different rhythms. Soon, I started noticing changes in Shannon. She was growing in confidence, moving better, and her muscle tone and co-ordination improved."

"Then, one day, out of the blue, Shannon came running up to me and said, "Mum, can we watch my DVD together?" That moment was so touching — it was the first time she had ever begun a conversation. I just wanted to sit and absorb every moment. This was the first time she had ever taken an interest in anything. It was incredible."

"My little girl now exudes a confidence I have never seen before. She takes the DVD everywhere she goes. It has given her a focus. Shannon would never usually go to anyone's house but she wanted to visit our neighbour and show her the DVD. She has also shown family members the steps. In fact, Shannon is teaching her sister Paige the dance moves. Usually, Paige helps her out with things but for Shannon to be able to think "I am the big sister, I am going to show you," it is huge. It is helping her co-ordination. We've still got a long way to go but the DVD won't wear out — if it does I will buy another. She has got progression from it and the fact she now speaks and starts conversations means our Christmas has come early."

Info at The Sun

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12-year-old boy finds rapping eases stuttering

Written by Angela Mulholland, CTVNews.ca

Like a lot of 12 year-olds, Jake Zeldin is a fan of Canadian rapper Drake. But unlike other 12-year-olds, Jake has actually had the chance to rap with him. Impressive enough; but what's more impressive is what rapping does for Jake.

Jake Zeldin has struggled with a significant stutter all his life. But when he starts to rap, that stutter disappears.

Communicating has been a struggle for Zeldin since he first started to speak. But ask him to rap one of his own written songs, and the sentences and rhymes tumble out easily, one right after the other.

Zeldin's mom Robyn says her son figured out how rap relaxes him fairly recently. "He discovered about two years ago that he has this ability – that when he raps he has fluid speech, which is incredible because sometimes it's a challenge to speak," she told CTV's Canada AM Monday. "Rapping has really helped. He's incorporated it in with book reports at school and with talking, so it's amazing for him."

Two weeks ago, Jake went with his brother Cole to a concert by rapper Tyga, where Drake and fellow rapper T-Pain were special guests. The brothers decided to see if they could get backstage, where they ran into T-Pain who they had met the previous summer at another concert. T-Pain gave them a hug and introduced them to Drake. The next thing Jake knew, he was showing off some of his rhymes to one of his idols.

He has been in speech therapy since his preschool years, but with none of the therapies working, he and his mother decided to stop for a while. "We haven't done any therapy for the last two years. We decided to take a little bit of break. But we may visit it again," Robyn said.

Stuttering remains largely a mystery to brain researchers. For some reason, most childhood stutterers recover with no help at all, with as many as three-quarters outgrowing the condition.

Some stutterers find they can speak perfectly well in one language but stutter in another. Others find they don't stutter when they sing, or when they speak to young children. And for still others, the condition clears up when they act on stage and take on a different persona.

While stuttering was once thought to be psychological condition caused by anxiety issues, it's now recognized as a neurological condition stemming from an as-yet undetermined brain wiring issues.

The long-held suspicion of a genetic link is bearing out: in recent years, a number of genetic mutations involved in stuttering have been identified. But since these mutations account for only about 10 per cent of cases, more still wait to be identified.

Robyn says for now, she and her son are working on using singing and rapping to help Jake communicate. Jake has been writing songs, putting his music and videos online under the stage name "Lil Jz," and dreaming of becoming a professional rapper.

Why rapping helps, his mother Robyn doesn't know. But she says they're going to use it as best they can. "He has this gift; he has a different way to communicate. I think it's amazing and we're just going to try to keep it up."

Read more and watch the video at CTV News