A study carried out by researchers at Dartmouth College in Hanover (New Hampshire, USA) shows us how studying art can change our brain and our abilities.
Alexander Schlegel and the rest of his team verified this by carrying out an experiment in which they compared a group of 17 young students who took a three-month introductory course to drawing and painting (between 19 and 24 hours per week of practice) with another group of 18 young people who did not take the art course but did an introductory course on organic chemistry.
All participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging to analyze brain changes and the following measures of their creative ability were taken.
1. Creative cognition or ability to think differently, generate new ideas by linking different information, which was evaluated through the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking Figural Form A.
2. Visual perception as the ability to create realistic representations of the world, which experimenters calculated based on changes in brain activity as participants judged the properties of visual illusions.
3. Step from perception to action or ability to convert thoughts into drawings, which would be the motor act of the hand, arm and eyes in this case. To assess this ability, they were asked to make a series of quick drawing gestures based on the observation of human figures while they were in the scanner.
The data showed that drawing and painting students increased their creative capacity and this was associated with the reorganization of the prefrontal part of their brains, specifically their white matter (the one that transmits information). In addition, the group of drawing students also improved their ability to translate the observation of images of the human figure into drawing gestures.
The latter, over time, was reflected in the pattern of neural activity in the cortex and cerebellum, this activity profile being increasingly different between art students and those of the other group.
The results, recently published in the scientific journal Neuroimage (2015), support the idea that brain plasticity allows the acquisition of artistic skills through brain changes in areas that are responsible for creative cognition and the integration between perception and movement. .
We have brains that can change with the practice of skills and this allows us to improve certain capacities. Once again, let’s not settle for the brain that has touched us and make the most of it.
Marisa Fernández, Senior Neuropsychologist, Unobrain
