How Art Changes Your Brain

How Art Changes Your Brain: Differential Effects of Visual Art Production and Cognitive Art Evaluation on Functional Brain Connectivity

Abstract

Visual art represents a powerful resource for mental and physical well-being. However, little is known about the underlying effects at a neural level. A critical question is whether visual art production and cognitive art evaluation may have different effects on the functional interplay of the brain’s default mode network (DMN). We used fMRI to investigate the DMN of a non-clinical sample of 28 post-retirement adults (63.71 years ±3.52 SD) before (T0) and after (T1) weekly participation in two different 10-week-long art interventions. Participants were randomly assigned to groups stratified by gender and age. In the visual art production group 14 participants actively produced art in an art class. In the cognitive art evaluation group 14 participants cognitively evaluated artwork at a museum. The DMN of both groups was identified by using a seed voxel correlation analysis (SCA) in the posterior cingulated cortex (PCC/preCUN). An analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was employed to relate fMRI data to psychological resilience which was measured with the brief German counterpart of the Resilience Scale (RS-11). We observed that the visual art production group showed greater spatial improvement in functional connectivity of PCC/preCUN to the frontal and parietal cortices from T0 to T1 than the cognitive art evaluation group. Moreover, the functional connectivity in the visual art production group was related to psychological resilience (i.e., stress resistance) at T1. Our findings are the first to demonstrate the neural effects of visual art production on psychological resilience in adulthood.

What’s So Great About Great-Books Courses?

The humanities are in danger, but humanists can’t agree on how—or why—they should be saved.

By Louis Menand

professors have been making the same complaints ever since the American research university came into being, in the late nineteenth century. “Rescuing Socrates” and “The Lives of Literature” can be placed on a long shelf that contains books such as Hiram Corson’s “The Aims of Literary Study” (1894), Irving Babbitt’s “Literature and the American College” (1908), Robert Maynard Hutchins’s “The Higher Learning in America” (1936), Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind” (1987), William Deresiewicz’s “Excellent Sheep” (2014), and dozens of other impassioned and sometimes eloquent works explaining that higher education has lost its soul. It’s a song that never ends.

Read the full article here

How Shakespeare Became an American Hero

Shakespeare gives us ways to talk about things and raises things that we can’t, to this day talk about. The vital radio show, On the Media interview with James Shapiro about his book Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future.

http://www.wnycstudios.org/story/on-the-media-how-shakespeare-became-american-hero-on-the-media

Scientists and poets are more alike

Scientists and poets are more alike than you might think:

Science and poetry haven’t always got along. The English poet John Keats (who also trained as a medical doctor) famously wrote the following in his narrative poem “Lamia” in 1819:

Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line

Read more:

Scientists and poets are more alike than you might think

It’s Out There Trying to Get In

In The Red Hand Files, Nick Cave has this advice for a “blocked” songwriter:

My advice to you is to change your basic relationship to songwriting. You are not the ‘Great Creator’ of your songs, you are simply their servant, and the songs will come to you when you have adequately prepared yourself to receive them. They are not inside you, unable to get out; rather, they are outside of you, unable to get in. Songs, in my experience, are attracted to an open, playful and motivated mind. Throw my song away – it isn’t that good anyway – sit down, prepare yourself and write your own damn song. You are a songwriter. You have the entire world to save and very little time to do it. The song will find its way to you. If you don’t write it, someone else will. Is that what you want? If not, get to it.

Comedian Jeremy Hardy dies of cancer aged 57

A really sad loss of a very funny comedian. If you don’t know his, check him out. He was someone for whom art and life were tightly entwined.

Comedian Jeremy Hardy dies of cancer aged 57

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/feb/01/comedian-jeremy-hardy-dies-of-cancer-aged-57?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_WordPress

Thank you for the music, HMV, but we don’t need you any more

HMV going again. I never loved Our Price, Tower or even Virgin, but they are past of every music fan’s landscape nonetheless.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/28/hmv-music-high-street-chains-record-shops?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_WordPress

Improv Nation

As I began reading Improv Nation, I was unconvinced by Sam Wasson’s broad statements and claim that improv is American’s most popular indigenous art form taking over from jazz. He makes a bunch of these claims, and Jason Zinoman picks up on many of these uncertainties, including the fact that Wasson ignores the rest of the world.

“It’s a valuable book, benefiting from dogged reporting and the kind of sweeping arguments that get your attention. By his second paragraph, Wasson, the author of five books including Fosse, argues that improv has become ‘America’s farthest-reaching indigenous art form,’ a bold, if defensible claim. On the next page, he writes that it ‘has replaced jazz as America’s most popular art.’ That is harder to ‘yes, and.'”

“To do justice to the impact of improv comedy, you need a wider lens, one that explores the increasing importance of improv theaters in the comedy ecosystem, the various schools of pedagogy and how the principles of improvisation have infiltrated the business world, traditional acting and popular culture.”

Full Review

 

Six Myths About Choosing a Major

From the New York Times: “Not all philosophy majors end up as baristas. And not all engineers get rich.”

Myth 4: Liberal arts majors are unemployable.

The liberal arts is a favorite target of politicians, with the latest salvo coming from the governor of Kentucky, Matt Bevin. “If you’re studying interpretive dance, God bless you, but there’s not a lot of jobs right now in America looking for people with that as a skill set,” Governor Bevin said in a speech in September.

Interpretive dance may not be in demand, but the competencies that liberal arts majors emphasize — writing, synthesis, problem solving — are sought after by employers. A 2017 study by David J. Deming, an associate professor of education and economics at Harvard, found jobs requiring both the so-called soft skills and thinking skills have seen the largest growth in employment and pay in the last three decades.

One knock on the liberal arts is that it’s difficult to find a first job. But a study by Burning Glass Technologies, a Boston-based company that analyzes job-market trends, concluded that if liberal arts graduates gain proficiency in one of eight technical skills, such as social media or data analysis, their prospects of landing entry-level jobs increase substantially.

The long-held belief by parents and students that liberal arts graduates are unemployable ignores the reality of the modern economy, where jobs require a mix of skills not easily packaged in a college major, said George Anders, author of “You Can Do Anything: The Surprising Power of a ‘Useless’ Liberal Arts Education.” In his book, Mr. Anders profiles graduates with degrees in philosophy, sociology and linguistics in jobs as diverse as sales, finance and market research.

“Once C.E.O.s see liberal arts graduates in action,” Mr. Anders said, “they come aboard to the idea that they need more of them.”

Full article…

Class, Interrupted

This article from the New York Times points to the fact that a crucial aspect of the humanities in creating forums for discussion, and teaching careful, reasoned spoken and written argumentation.  Unfortunately, not all professors and students can get beyond their hard shells of prejudice to begin discussion, and at the same time those shells are so sensitive to the touch of any disagreement, that the conversation halts as it begins.  But we have to keep moving forward respectfully but at the same time valuing evidence and logic.