What your creative practice reveals about your brain’s youth

We keep saying how „art is good for you” and how creative expression is fundamental to our well-being and mental health, yet we rarely are able to provide any science to back it up. Diving into the wonderful world of research, we mainly end up finding papers reporting improved well-being and empathy, but little actually investigating brain health – up till October of this year, where a group of 50 researchers coauthored a massive multi-method reanalysis of different datasets of previous studies, focusing on the relationship between brain health and art.

The thing is, how do we measure brain health? Well in this case, the problem was literally ran against the clock – the brain clock. The difference between our real age and our brain age (Brain Age Gap, BAG for friends) has been shown to be a good measure of our thinking organ’s condition, with an acceleration of aging observed in multiple brain diseases. Up till now, no studies had connected brain age gaps with biophysical whole-brain models and efficiency measures (using graph theory) into one – meaning we didn’t know how creativity affected brain clocks in terms of mechanisms. No wonder this article, titled “Creative experiences and brain clocks” got to be published in the very prestigious Nature communications.

The research pipeline was roughly the same for each creative domain – “experts” were compared to non-experts in terms of brain connectivity, using a brain age “prediction system” (a statistical model relying on machine learning) built on the data of the participants from every creative domain. This framework identified the connections in the brain which were the best predictors of age, but also the regions impacted by expertise and by learning, allowing a precise modelisation of the mechanisms behind brain health improvement by art.

While all creative domains brought significant brain age gaps to their practitioners, each of them impacted different areas and connections of the brain, with some offering more brain rejuvenation than others. So, what group are you in?

Musicians and brain benefits

For this group, the “expert panel” included professional and amateur musicians, all with at least 5 years of regular practice. It included players of a range of instruments (such as strings and percussion), but also singers.  Their brain health was compared to that of non-musicians.

Musician brains were on average 5.4 years younger than their matched controls – and this brain-age delay increased with years of musical expertise. They also presented increased brain connectivity in the frontoparietal (involved in executive function and goal-oriented, cognitively demanding tasks), motor, auditory and imagery-related networks. 

Dancers and why movement boosts brain health

Tango dancers, on whom the dancing dataset was trained, were the overall winners of the brain age delay race. The model demonstrated a difference of as much as  7.1 years on average between experts (people having more than 12 months of formal dance instruction) actual age and their brain age! This was compared to people with minimal tango experience (1-2 months on average)

The relationship between brain aging gap and expertise was very strong for tango dancers: the more tango training, the more delayed the brain age. Effects were mostly observed in rhythm, movement anticipation, and frontoparietal connection hubs. These most strengthened areas where the ones which typically degrade the most with age, giving the saying “you are never too old to dance” a whole new meaning

Visual artists and brain advantages

The panel of expert participants considered for this category were formally trained art students and early-career artists. While they were not necessarily professionally working in the domain, they had to be systematically schooled, with at least three years of university-level academic education in art, specifically in drawing. The results were compared to people without drawing-training and who did not draw regularly

Coming close seconds behind tango dancers, visual artists showed a 6.2 years younger brain age difference as compared to non-artists. The effect strengthened the more years of drawing training the person had. Visual artists showed more efficient visual processing, object recognition, attentional selection (salience) and imagery networks. 

Gamers and fast brain gains 

Cinema is fairly known as the 7^th art – far less people know that video games are the 10^th. Obviously so, gamers got their spotlight too! They even got a bit of a special treatment, being the only creative domain group who was also investigated in terms of learning effects on the brain. But let’s start at the beginning.

First, the classic: experts vs non-practitioners. In this case, elite StarCraft II players, with at least 6 hours per week dedicated to Real Time Strategy (RTS) games over the last 6 month, 60% of their total game time dedicated specifically to Star Craft II. All of them were active during the last two considered competitive seasons and were ranked in the highest leagues.  On the other side, the amateurs: players with maximum 8 hours of total weekly game time and less than 6 hours on RTS games – effectively casual or non-gamers.

Expert gamer brain age gap was 4.1 years younger on average, with increased connectivity in attention, decision-making, visual-motor integration networks. Special prize for the expert gamers, who were also the only group across the study showing increased global coupling, or enhanced communication capacity across the whole brain.

But fear not, it is not too late to rejuvenate your brain! In a second analysis, non (or very casual) gamers were engaged in 30 hours of StarCraft II training, while another group was discovering Hearthstone (an online card game, chosen for its limited improvisation and creative aspect as compared to StarCraft II). After 3-4 weeks, improved accuracy and reaction times, as well as a 3.1 years brain age gap were observed in the first group players, but not in the second  – suggesting this effect is specific to the more creative aspect of RTS games.

Experience art, community, and brain-healthy creativity with Creatosphere

So in which group are you? No matter the domain, art seems to offer brain ageing delay, improved connectivity and efficiency across the brain networks engaged with it. Importantly, the more years of training or better performance, the younger the brains looked – confirming it’s never too late to start, and the best art is always the one you create, rather than putting it off.

Looking for a way to jump start your creativity and art production? Check Creatosphere’s upcoming events and projects! We are sure to have something for you.

by Eve Enfer