As this article explains, there is a new kind of neuroscience that examines how the experience of art affects your brain.
https://apple.news/ApKmwwmY7TRiq_MqhOMSkdw
It’s all good.
“There is something about being in a group that stimulates your reactions. There’s something about the performance that heightens your senses.
“If you think about it, having a great time at the theater defies logic in many ways. We’re surrounded by strangers, bombarded with unusual images and often faced with a wordless language of symbols. Yet, on a good night, we generally laugh more, cry more and enjoy ourselves more at a live performance than when we’re watching TV at home. We may even lose ourselves and feel connected to something larger. How does this happen?…
“Social connection is one of the strengths of our species — it’s how we learn from others by imitation. We’re keenly attuned to the emotions and actions of people around us, because our brains are designed for this.
“If, for example, you’ve ever gone to an experimental performance-art piece where there’s hardly anyone in the audience but you, and you’ve felt a little exposed and awkward, this is why. We crave social connection. And the cues we get from those around us help our brains make sense of our surroundings. This starts from the moment we walk into a crowd….
“It helps us make sense of human behavior, a large part of which is evaluating movement and emotion within us and around us. Our brains like to share emotions with others. This is just one reason that seeing a live performance — a concert, play, opera, etc. — is a neural rush. With our brain’s capacity for emotion and empathy, even in the wordless art of dance we can begin to discover meaning — and a story.”
Open the link to see performances and understand how we react to art.
We need the arts. We need to see them, perform them, experience them, enjoy them. They are part of what makes us human.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I can’t access the Washington Post. I would prefer a link to the study. I want to read about what the researchers count as “art” among other important matters.
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Ditto! Tho I can access many WaPo articles free, this one wants a buck to look at it! Anybody find a free read, post it.
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Two thoughts:
Poetry was almost dead until the spoken word movement revitalized it. Now, lots of good work being done
In the theatre, it’s a lousy show if you can count on the performances of it being the same
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Here’s a link to the article on a nonpaywalled site:
http://www.princegeorgecitizen.com/washington-post/entertainment/this-is-your-brain-on-art-1.23022076
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Oh thanks for link, Bob S, I should have scrolled down before commenting.
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The article mentions that part of the power of theatre is that we are fascinated by other people’s narratives. (It doesn’t put it quite this way, but it should have.)
David Coleman infamously spoke against teaching kids to write narratives. Maybe that’s because his puppet-masters don’t want proles writing narratives. They want to keep that to themselves.
Narrative is, of course, one of our primary means of making sense of the world.
Every memory we have, when we have it, is confabulation–the brain taking bits of stored stuff and weaving them into a plausible story automatically. This is built in. We are story-making creatures.
When we say we have understood something historical, it’s because we have imposed a narrative frame upon the events.
Psychological ill health often has a lot to do with unhealthy narratives that people play over and over to themselves.
Advertisers and propagandists figured out a long time ago that their biggest appeals were sex, belonging, and insecurity. And their most powerful tools were imagery and narrative.
Our dreams take random bits of recent stuff and put together a story. They are often an attempt by the brain to weave those random firings into a coherent narrative–again because that’s how we make sense of things.
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I’d love to think the edumetricians who dictate what’s efficient in ed delivery take such neural research into consideration, revising & expanding recommended ed policy– after all, it’s physical (!), not soft & mushy like ed / social/ psych research, right?
Wrong. Cuz they answer to different masters, & neural research has no more coin than the other disciplinary research when policy agenda is to cut all $ to ed unless it’s got kickback to private enterprise.
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Agree. So much more going on.
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Thanks for the link. I am with bethree5 on this.
There are names of persons who are doing research, but no studies. Even if there were studies, I would be skeptical of their importance in education.
I do not think that theories about brain function, and the wonders of brain imaging techniques, are superior to other ways of understanding and promoting the values of artistry in human experience and in reminding us of our humanity, warts and all.
I am skeptical of most uses of brain-based research and imaging as if these provide justifications for experiencing and teaching in the arts.
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As usual Laura, spot on
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There’s a lot of technocratic hubris these days. People are very proud of themselves for figuring out how to make electric can openers, and then they start treating everything–the universe, other people, as if it were an electric can opener.
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I find the observations from brain research interesting, but that is all. Someone will try to turn it into a tool to rate or rank something that they can “scale up” and sell. It doesn’t matter that we don’t know enough to draw the conclusion that there is some benefit. It’s like taking a medication that has not even reached the human trial stage and deciding to make it available to the public because it increased the life span of rats by a couple of months.
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Argh. I feel this way about a lot of brain-body research. I remember yrs ago being infuriated by a science article reporting dreams were no more than the sleeping brain’s interpretation of random electric signals in the brain stem. They could have gotten that from Dickens if they read anything [““You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”– Scrooge]… Little interest or pursuit of the brain’s drive to create a narrative, just ‘aha. Random physical phenomena.’
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