Jul 27, 2019
Art comforts, elevates the spirit and affirms life and hope.
Consider creativity a wellness practice. The arts are important for
our lives because beauty has a powerful role. When we are involved
in creativity, we feel that we are living more fully than during
the rest of life. Creativity produces mental wealth.
Let’s take a look at just one of the arts. Music. Music
impacts brain function by reducing stress, pain and symptoms of
depression as well as improving cognitive and motor skills,
spatial-temporal learning and neurogenesis, which is the brain’s
ability to produce neurons.
Musical training strengthens the brain’s executive function.
Executive function covers critical tasks like processing and
retaining information, controlling behavior, making decisions and
problem solving.
After James Allison, a scientist and musician, won the 2018
Nobel Peace Prize in Medicine for a major breakthrough in cancer
research, he shared, "My lab has been so well-tuned it feels like a
really good band.” After I read about his approach in the lab, I
couldn’t help but hear the music improvisation. He hadn’t
consciously known where he was going with all of this
experimentation and suddenly they had arrived at a result that had
cured cancer in mice.
Einstein had a mind that came up with some ideas that would
have to wait 100 years to be proven correct. Einstein was an
accomplished violinist. He thought about science in terms of images
and intuitions often drawn from his experience as a musician. Then
later converted these into logic, words and mathematics. He wanted
his science to be unified, harmonious, expressed simply and to
convey a sense of beauty in form.
It’s your authentic expression through art making, music,
song, movement, writing and other forms of art-based imagination
that makes creativity central to a wellness practice.
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