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

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

It was kindly meant – she’d enjoyed the session. The thing was, I already knew myself that the hospital arts programme wasn’t just entertainment. Far from it. In that sing-along session, I’d seen a patient who couldn’t remember the relatives who were visiting her sing along word-perfect to The White Cliffs of Dover and chat away afterwards about her childhood. Earlier that day, I’d seen a child with burns in the accident and emergency department who hadn’t needed any morphine once the theatre group started their performance, a premature baby who was crying inconsolably and refusing food but who calmed and started feeding the moment her mother started singing, and a man who’d had a stroke whose walking suddenly increased in speed and symmetry when we put headphones on him. Yes, the arts programme was enjoyable, and a welcome alternative for many patients to television viewing. But I was seeing firsthand, every day, the tangible, meaningful effects the arts were having on patients’ health. And I wanted to understand how and why these effects were happening – what was going on inside our brains and bodies. So, I left the hospital to find the answers.

For over a decade since, I’ve worked as a psychobiologist and epidemiologist researching the impact of the arts on our health. And the findings emerging from research studies – mine and others carried out all around the world – are getting more and more exciting. When we pick up a book, listen to a song, dance at a party or engage in a crafts activity, we activate biological processes across the body that support diverse 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, leading to reductions over time in our heart rate and blood pressure. We experience reductions in levels of stress hormones in our endocrine system and inflammation in our immune system. We even alter the expression of our genes, reducing those involved in stress response and increasing those involved in beneficial cognitive processes like neurogenesis.

If we can maintain regular engagement in the arts over the course of months and years – participating in the arts or attending cultural performances and events – we can see widespread longer-term physiological changes. We experience increases in the volume of grey matter in regions of the brain involved in memory, auditory processes and motor learning. We produce different patterns of proteins in our bodies that are linked to enhanced cognitive functioning, and reduced depression and infection risk. We even appear to stay biologically “younger” for longer – new studies just emerging using brain clocks, epigenetic clocks and physiological ageing clocks that all combine different kinds of biological data to tell us if we’re ageing faster or slower than our chronological age are finding that arts engagement predicts younger biological age.

All of these changes can add up to have meaningful effects on our overall health. People who are regularly engaged in the arts not only have higher levels of happiness, life satisfaction, meaning and purpose in their lives, 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 behaviour and lifestyles.)

These results have collectively been emerging from randomised controlled trials, laboratory experiments and large-scale epidemiological analyses that observe population-level effects of the arts. And they are paralleled by an enormous body of research testing specific arts interventions in healthcare settings for particular patient groups, from singing classes for people who have lost their speech following a stroke, to magic camps 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 arts may even be more effective than some of the things we already recommend to people. Take pre-operative anxiety – music appears to have the edge over anti-anxiety medicines like benzodiazepines (not to mention fewer side effects).

Of course, it’s important to be clear on the limitations. Arts engagement is definitely not a panacea. There are plenty of examples of the arts even doing harm, whether as a result of deliberate weaponisation or from poorly designed projects that haven’t considered issues like safeguarding properly. I debunk a whole host of unhelpful myths in Art Cure, from arts increasing the IQ of babies to killing cancer cells. There are also many areas of this field that are still developing, where we have exciting pilots but are awaiting larger trials. But the time definitely feels right to be lifting the lid on this evidence base and talking about it.

Because if a drug had the same catalogue of benefits as the arts, we’d be telling everyone about it, fighting to get our hands on it, paying premium prices, taking it religiously every day, investing billions into further research and development. So, what a joy that the recommendations I put forward in Art Cure aren’t 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 the arts transform our health (Cornerstone Press), the March read for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up to read along with us here