How Does Arts Education Affect Our Brains?

Think of how much is learned in the early years of a life: crawling, walking, talking. These learned skills are sculpting the circuitry of the brain though plasticity. As you get a little older and begin to practice skills, neurons connect and those activities become easier. Practice a song, and soon you know it “by heart,” which, technically speaking, is “by brain.” Learn a dance, and soon you can perform its steps without consciously thinking because the neurons connect to dendrites and over time that builds a habit. This is a prime example of how arts education affects our brains.

Your unique life circumstances and surroundings also help to form your brain connections. The brains of humans are born immature for a reason. By delaying the maturation and growth of brain circuits, initial learning about the environment and the world around us can influence the developing brain in ways that support more complex learning. This is why the environment, and engagement from the moment you are born, is so critical. A more enriched environment contributes to better neural connections — as evidenced by research from Marian Diamond and many others since. Impoverished environments too often result in reduced synaptic circuitry.

There’s been a lot of interest in how arts education specifically enhances learning through plasticity. One study from 2010 looked at the adult brains of professional musicians, and the findings offer insights into childhood brain development. Researchers saw that musical expertise had an effect on the structural plasticity of the brain in the hippocampus. The hippocampus is an area of the brain that facilitates the storage and retrieval of information. The ability to learn and play music is very complex, and it marshals the hippocampus and its many connections to other brain areas. When compared with non-musicians, the musicians had formed more neural connections and gray matter.

Originally, neuroscientists hypothesized that the hippocampi of musicians had more gray matter than non-musicians because they were born that way, already equipped with the tools they needed to learn and play music. But now neuroscientists hypothesize the opposite: Because they practiced their instrument and mastered their art over the years, musicians built more robust synaptic connections in their brain.

Arts education enhances the ability of the hippocampus and the other areas of your brain to perform the tasks that they were designed to do by increasing the synaptic circuits. This helps not only in the playing of music but in any life activity where learning and memory are needed.

In other words: Practicing music increases synapses and gray matter. The results of the study correlate with the findings in the YOLA study in Los Angeles. The researcher found that children receiving music instruction had changes in the size of the brain regions that are engaged in processing sound. It got bigger. And “the young musicians also showed a stronger connectivity in the corpus callosum, an area that allows communication between the two hemispheres of the brain,” according to the findings.

These neurological benefits extend beyond music. The National Endowment for the Arts, NEA, has been studying and supporting studies that examine the effect that the arts have on young brains for decades, offering insight into how the arts support emotional resilience in children and adolescents as they learn.

Allison Green
Boston Tutoring Services