Art Making and the Life Force (4)
After a couple of weeks looking for relevant research, I will have to revise my opinion: although I have not found massive studies with thousands of subjects, I have found dozens of peer-reviewed studies. Again: I'm not going to attempt a comprehensive lit review, but instead plan a relatively tight meander through relevant findings that resonate with my experience.
Recall that in my first post on this topic, I centered the narrative on my mother, who after serious surgery in her mid-90s, lost her ability to walk, move, and talk -- and who started coming back to the land of the living after I put a loaded paintbrush in her hand and guided it to a piece of watercolor paper. That "coming back to the land of the living" is a pretty radical claim. How might it be possible? I found studies with older adults that show that actively producing art (not just looking at it -- which also has benefits) can strengthen functional creativity in key brain nerve networks that are closely tied to imagination and self regulation. (How Art Changes your Brain)
I'll return to neuroplasticity -- the brain's ability to revise itself, essential to learning as well as recovery from brain illness or injury. But I don't want to leave the subject of the benefits of viewing art without a mention of the Museum of Modern Art's Meet Me At MoMA program for Alzheimer's patients and their caregivers, which was evaluated by researchers at New York University:
Researchers at New York University Medical School spent nine months observing the sessions. They had participants fill out questionnaires and organized in-depth focus groups with participants. The mood of those with Alzheimer’s improved during the sessions.
Caregivers also enjoyed the museum outings, reporting that they felt a greater sense of social connection and less emotional distress afterwards. Seeing a loved one with dementia light up about a painting or piece of sculpture can help them to once again catch a glimpse of the person they once knew more fully.
Similar programs are now offered at dozens of museums across the country, including the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
Researchers at New York University Medical School spent nine months observing the sessions. They had participants fill out questionnaires and organized in-depth focus groups with participants. The mood of those with Alzheimer’s improved during the sessions.
Caregivers also enjoyed the museum outings, reporting that they felt a greater sense of social connection and less emotional distress afterwards. Seeing a loved one with dementia light up about a painting or piece of sculpture can help them to once again catch a glimpse of the person they once knew more fully.
Similar programs are now offered at dozens of museums across the country, including the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
The article about Meet Me at MoMA offered a neuroscience-based clue to why my friend with Alzheimer's and my mother post-surgery were able to learn to improve their artistic expression even while their other cognitive capacities were degrading (my mother later succumbed to dementia before her death at 99). Perhaps parts of the brain involved in creative expression degrade more slowly than those associated with verbal communication, memory, abstract thought:
Art might be a good choice for someone with Alzheimer’s disease for a variety of reasons. For one thing, the ability to make art, and certainly the ability to look at art, is relatively preserved in those with Alzheimer’s disease. Deficits like impaired memory, learning and language are typically not impediments to making art, especially in the early to moderate stages of the illness. The artist Willem de Kooning, for one, continued to paint after his diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, with his painting style becoming looser and more lyrical and his colors bright and primary. Some critics consider this late-life work among his best.
Art is also an expression of feelings and emotions, and nonverbal skills are typically less affected in the course of Alzheimer’s disease than verbal skills. Patients with Alzheimer’s have rich internal emotional lives that might find expression in the art making progress. Most patients express a wide range of facial emotions even late in the course of the disease. Through the use of line, form and color, art may provide a way for those with the disease to express their inner emotions and feelings.
Back to neuroplasticity: I wrote about this more than a decade ago, when I was considering attentional control as a form of literacy (which continues to be challenged by what has been termed "surveillance capitalism" that uses psychological tricks to attract and maintain attention online as a means of selling advertising). The reason these psychological tricks (like the little red flag on your email app icon that calls you to temporarily abandon your task of the moment to see who is communicating with you) are effective is that most people have little training on maintaining and focusing attention and metacognition -- awareness of their own thinking and attentional processes. The good news is that training one's attention is well known and backed by a wealth of research into meditation practices.
When I was studying the psychology of consciousness in the 1960s, one research study became the center of my undergraduate thesis at Reed College. A neuroscientist, Joe Kamiya, connected experienced meditators to an electroencephalograph, a device that detects very very small voltage waves through scalp electrodes, and noted that the meditators exhibited a significantly higher percentage of "alpha" waves in the 8-12 cycles per second range than the majority of the population. Kamiya's insight that made this experiment so significant was that he then connected people who had no experience with meditation to the EEG device and arranged for a tone to sound whenever the experimental subjects' brainwaves wandered into the alpha zone. Kamiya demonstrated that these meditation-naive subjects were able to self-invoke prolonged periods of alpha through feedback learning. Back then, I was not the only student of consciousness who felt that this ability to consciously learn control over unconscious processes was a key to unlock vast capabilities. Neurofeedback is indeed useful, and it's application to research using today's far more sensitive equipment such as functional MRI may indeed fulfill the ultimate promise of Kamiya's research -- but EEG feedback ended up with limited usefulness. After a year of graduate work in neuroscience, I concluded that mapping consciousness with brainwaves was akin to mapping the sea floor by observing the waves from a cliff -- useful to a small degree, but no more.
In neuroplasticity terms, creative practice gives repeated, meaningful, multisensory workouts to perception, memory, emotion, and motor planning networks—conditions that foster rewiring and compensation in aging brains. Creative making recruits widely distributed neural networks and nudges them to work together again. Reviews in 2024–2025 argue that this is the plausible mechanism behind the benefits seen in art therapy, while also warning against oversimplified “miracle” claims; the strongest effects appear when people make art regularly, with structure and social support. (How the arts heal: a review of the neural mechanisms behind the therapeutic effects of creative arts on mental and physical health)
In regard to structure, I am a believer in my mother the art teacher's philosophy: Creativity is not a talent for a few but the birthright of every human. The point is not whether every person is worthy of becoming a professional artist -- certainly there are talented people whose art is more attractive to others -- but that the process of expressing oneself with visual, musical, movement arts is a self-teaching conversation with oneself. My mother taught permission to play without self-judging long before she intervened with tips on technique, and that is the approach that I have taken with my friend. I modeled the process by splattering watercolors on postcards. l have found the Zentangle approach useful: step-by-steps guides for structured doodling that doesn't require drawing a horse that looks like a horse. The structured doodles then serve as templates for a watercolor painting.
(More to come...)