551 - Consume and Create Art to Get Your Brain Back with Scientist Daisy Fancourt

0:00Is it just me or do you feel like you can't function right now because your brain is mush? Maybe it's just me. I hope it's not because if it is just me, it's very embarrassing to make a whole episode about it. But I have felt increasingly over the past 10 years like my brain is just more and more chaotic, more static, not just because I'm ADHD, but because of just the chaotic nature of the times that we live in. I have a theory that I explored last episode where I think that part of the problem is, is yes, we're in trying times, but there've been lots and lots of trying times throughout history.

0:42I feel like ours is unique in how mushy our brains are. And I wonder if it has something to do with our lack of whole food creativity, Like creativity, media, art, movies, books that are really helping us have a lens to view our lives as meaningful, even in the fight, even in the difficulty. Like that's what art can really do. And I feel like this static of short form video and screen engaging with art through screens primarily is making it harder to see the threads, to see the point of view that I want to have in my art and the stance I want to take and the values I want to hold in my life. And so last week we did an episode exploring this idea, but guess what?

1:35I am limited in my experience as an artist and I wanted to ask an actual expert, Daisy Fancourt, who wrote this book called Art Cure, The Science of How the Arts Save Lives. And this person knows a thing or two about this because she's a freaking professor and scientist, award-winning scientist and science communicator and director of the World Health Organization's Collaborating Center for Arts and Health. So she actually knows a lot about this and I'm going to chat with her today. I absolutely loved this talk and it just made me want to double down on the creative discipline of making sure that I am consuming stuff that isn't just creative junk food.

2:24She's going to talk about all that and what art can do for you and why it's so essential. And at the end, we're going to talk about swapping, how you can do something really small to get more of your creative five a day, to get more of the fruits and veggies that make life just so much more meaningful and make more sense and give you a solid ground to kind of create from and walk through your life with. But first, let's talk about, with Daisy, why art is this missing core piece of our healthy lifestyles. On the creative journey, it's easy to get lost. But don't worry, you'll lift off. Sometimes you just need a creative pep talk.

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5:51You have a new book, Art Cure. I've got an early copy here. From my understanding, it's like you're kind of arguing that engaging in art is this missing fifth pillar of health. Is that correct? Is that what the book is kind of about? Yes. I mean, essentially, we're all familiar with the fact that exercise, diet, sleep, nature, these things are really important to our health. But we just don't see the arts being discussed alongside those other behaviors. And I think that's fundamentally wrong, because actually, the evidence base shows that it has health benefits, just like those other behaviors, we should all be doing it day to day, we should all be talking about it.

6:29And that's why I wanted to write this book to raise awareness about the evidence base and hopefully help people to change their own behaviors. I love that. One thing that's been on my mind recently is I know not everyone in culture has moved away from religion, but increasingly secular culture in the West. And I wonder if that is a little bit why we've, I don't think a lot of people think of religion as art engagement, but there is, there are so many arts wrapped up in spiritual practice. And as that's exited our lives, that seems like maybe that's a part of it. I'm curious if you ever, if you've thought much about that.

7:08It's kind of a random aside, actually. No, it's actually a really fundamental one. Because if you look back across our history, the way that we've engaged with the arts has been fundamentally embedded within community ritual and participation. Often that's been around religion or other kinds of community congregation. And actually, for a lot of people, church or wherever else they went for their faith was a place where they would encounter the arts day to day or week on week, whether that's through singing or through dancing or through seeing artworks within those religious spaces. But as many societies have become more secular, those opportunities within that weekly calendar to have that arts engagement have actually disappeared for a lot of people, meaning that now we're often forced to find other ways to engage in the arts.

7:54And it's not necessarily interwoven into the patterns of our week and the way it used to be. It's interesting because for a long time in my life, I wouldn't have thought of engaged as a creative person. I wouldn't have thought of engaging in art as anything more than just something I wanted to do. I was passionate about doing it. I enjoyed the entertainment side of it. Whereas now I almost feel like there is a desire and a movement towards seeking a little bit of discipline in the way that we engage with art similar to you see in the what you see in like a religious culture where there is this discipline of days of the week that you're doing these things singing together um reflecting all that kind of thing um but because of things like the internet and short form video and these sorts of things.

8:44It seems like our engagement with art is just being completely edged out if we don't take a more active stance. I think this is a real concern because actually our lives are so crowded and busy nowadays. It's sort of like we're having to compete. Behaviors are having to compete for which ones we're actually going to have the space for day to day. And again, if you look back, like arts engagement was something that people had much higher levels of organically, whereas now We ran a study in the U.S. last year looking at time use data. And if you ask average adults in the street in the U.S., did you engage in the arts yesterday?

9:21Do you want to guess what percentage will say yes? Oh, man, I'm scared to. 5%. Oh, my gosh. That's worse than I was going to guess low knowing it was bad news. I was going to guess like 12%, but 5 % is bad. So this is why I think it's really important that we are like thinking, how can we integrate this behavior more into our lives? It's not about forcing people that they have to do arts, but it's about saying this is a behavior that is so important to your health, to your well-being. You need to make space for it. And we want to support you in using the latest in behavioral science to know how you can motivate yourself to find that space.

10:00Yeah, that sounds important. And I think that as an artist myself, I, of course, value the arts. And that's an intuitive thing for me. Like I have this feeling that this matters to me and to other people, whether they're making it or engaging in it, you know, engaging in consuming it and reflecting on it. But you have more than intuition around this. Like what is the, what does the data say around what this does for people or what the absence of it does? So if we're just looking at that day-to-day engagement, so you're not doing it for your health, you're just doing it because you enjoy it because it's a leisure activity.

10:37I'm an epidemiologist. So I specialize in looking at how those day-to-day behaviors influence long-term mental and physical health outcomes. And actually what we see from very big data analysis is that daily patterns of arts engagement are linked in with a reduced risk of developing conditions like depression. They're linked in with higher levels of well-being over time, higher life satisfaction. People who engage regularly actually have better preservation of cognition as they get older, a lower risk of developing dementia. They also have a lower risk of developing conditions like chronic pain, as well as better aging as they get older.

11:11So in fact, reduced risk of developing age-related conditions like frailty. And in fact, there are even now over a dozen studies showing that people who are regularly engage in the arts, that that is linked through to a longer life expectancy as well. And is this making art specifically, or is it consuming? Is it a mix of both? Both. Essentially, what we see is that both participating or more receptive, watching or consuming, that they both have benefits for health. Often the ways in which they're working can be a little bit different about whether you're participating or whether you are sort of enjoying that watching experience of it.

11:46And I think a crucial thing people sometimes say is, is it actually about arts or is it just if you've got enough money to do arts or you've got enough spare time? Was it, in other words, about these other things in your life? But actually, no, it is about the arts. And we see this both from the big data analysis and also from randomized controlled trials, which use kind of very causal approaches, using the same kinds of approaches you'd use to test a drug, but to look at arts engagement, actually showing that these are the outcomes that we see as a direct result of that engagement. That's fantastic.

12:15So the thing that I just hate talking about. I really hate talking about it. I try not to bring it up very much because every conversation everywhere I go is just consumed by, you might guess what I'm going to say, AI. I'm sick of it. I don't really want to talk about it. But there's like a latent or deep hidden hope and feeling that all of this rise of AI is going to awaken some kind of alternative counterculture that is deeply obsessed with humanity and artistry and kind of handmade things and heart-filled stuff. And as I, you know, news around AI is coming out and we're seeing things like the MIT study that's like claiming like 47 % drop in brain activity with regular engagement in AI, like really scary stuff.

13:14It feels like this work that you've done is almost a counter to that. It almost feels like, hey, or you could, yeah, you could engage with AI constantly and see this happen, or you could consume and engage in art. Have you thought much about this connection? Yeah. One of the really interesting areas of evidence around arts is around their cognitive effects. And arts engagement is really good because it's actually a sort of whole brain workout. If you're doing something like, for example, making music, that's involving so many different parts of the brain that are involved in visual, like optics of seeing notes on a page, in memory, remembering lyrics, for example, that the regions of the brain involved in emotions, also involved in the sensory and the motor actions that are responsible for making that music.

14:01So there are so many different brain regions being activated. And actually, a lot of studies now show that if people are regularly engaged in arts, this can actually affect the connectivity between brain regions and even alter the size and functioning of different regions in the brain. And actually, some of the latest evidence that came out just a couple of months ago was showing that both amateur and professional artists, people who've got those regular patterns of age of engagements, they actually have better connectivity between regions of the brain that are most vulnerable to aging and they actually have younger overall brains and this very much feeds into a lot of evidence on that a theory called cognitive reserve how you can build the resilience of your brain against conditions like dementia so in other words even if your brain might be developing the pathological signs of dementia if you've got good cognitive reserve it means you can compensate for longer so you can sort of maintain better cognitive functioning but longer before it really starts to affect you day to day.

14:56And what's concerning is a lot of things like AI that are then removing things that would be cognitively challenging. There is a truth to that saying, use it or lose it. And I think arts engagement is really valuable as being such a good way of using it because it is that whole brain workout. So I am hopeful that people will be latching onto that more as we start to see more fears about the lose it attitude that AI could have on our brains. I love the idea of thinking of going to an art museum, going to the movies, these sorts of things as an art gym that is a gym for your brain. I've heard it compared to actually like as transport became things like cars and we were walking less.

15:42That's when gyms had to spring up, right? Like we had to compensate for the fact that we weren't using those muscles on a regular basis in ways of like manual labor. And yeah, engaging with art, maybe that. I can just imagine a world where you go to a doctor and they're like, OK, it looks like you just AI has completely atrophied your brain. We're going to have to prescribe art. Ah, but that already happens. Yeah. So doctors already can prescribe art. So in the UK, we've actually got a whole national program of what's called social prescribing. So doctors can literally write a prescription for you to go to art classes or nature classes or volunteering or social or community groups.

16:21And it's actually now a program that's operating in 40 different countries around the world. And arts activities are one of the really common things people get referred to. In fact, I've been working in the US over the last couple of years on a project that was called One Nation, One Project. And it was looking at arts on prescription in 18 different sites around the US, like piloting it and evaluating it. And the results that come through are so positive in terms of these sort of myriad health benefits. So actually, I think this is something we're going to need more of because organically, we're often now not engaging as much in the behaviors that are beneficial for us.

16:56So we're sort of having to almost medically prescribe it ourselves to make sure that we have that time that we recognize the value and we engage. Yeah, I love that. And I also love what you said about the whole brain exercise. one of the things that I say on the show most often is I think of creativity as a whole brain activity. It's a, it is a whole brain require. I think we just, when we think of creativity, we, we associate that with types of thinking and behaviors that are kind of isolated to certain parts of the brain. But as a creative and a writer, I'm always thinking like, oh, when I'm creating versus editing, I can tell these are total, they're almost totally two different people.

17:38And I can feel like, oh, I have to access different rooms of my brain. And it's true. Like even when you engage with music versus movies or a book, you can feel also, oh, this is a totally different cognitive space. It feels like. But do you remember a few years ago, there was that big fad about brain training apps, like use these apps to stop dementia risk. But of course that was a fundamentally flawed approach because each one of those apps like trained one specific cognitive process. But the whole point is that actually, if you want to build cognitive reserve, cognitive resilience, it's about building lots of new neural connections and strengthening lots of different pathways, which again, is what the arts are so good at.

18:13So it's not that surprising that when they did big studies, a lot of those brain training apps actually weren't achieving the overall benefits that people were hoping for. Whereas actually, when you engage in arts, you can actually see these cognitive benefits, particularly as people get older and in a really tangible way. It feels like the equivalent of saying you've got to do the brain version of leg day. You can't just work on the biceps, okay, with these apps. So I know that you have 10 guiding principles in your book that kind of go along with integrating this into your life. I wanted to see if you had one that was your favorite and if not one, two or three that you were like, oh, these are like really juicy.

18:53Yeah. Well, throughout the book, I tried to give really like specific recommendations for particular clinical outcomes, clinical conditions, like this is how you can really target your arts engagements. But I think for a lot of people, it's just about how can you engage more day to day. So I give people a whole checklist of like, what are the barriers? Because depending on what your barriers are, there'll be different solutions, whether it's more of a psychological fear, that you're not creative, or kind of a practical issue about having enough time or having enough opportunities. But I think there are some there are some very simple ways we can think about it and one is to align it to our diet so many of us are aware of like we've got a rule like have five a day of fruit and vegetables or something like that and I think it's really helpful if we can figure out what's our equivalent of that what's that single rule you could have in your life like is that having 10 or 15 or 20 minutes a day that you always make for creative engagements and I'd say you can extend that metaphor as well if you want to broaden it so we know with our diet you need like a variety of ingredients because they've all got different health benefits.

19:51It's the same for arts. You can't just do one art form all the time because that is giving you some benefits, but actually diversity of different benefits through doing different arts activities. Each one of those will challenge your brain and support your health in different ways. And I'd say most of all as well, remember you don't have to be a great chef to cook your food. Equally, you've not got to be really good at arts for it to benefit your health. It genuinely is the participating that actually achieves a lot of those health benefits. That's great. And it reminds me of when I have done episodes on like finding your style and developing your creative voice.

20:26One of the things I talk about a lot is, you know, the outdated food pyramid. I know they don't use that in health circles anymore, but I like to think of like an art food pyramid of, I think of this thing of like you art what you eat. So what you consume has a lot to do with the stuff that you're making. And I think about like, if you're only consuming the creative junk food, like short form video, that's mostly what you're going to create. So I like this idea of kind of tying it to thinking of your diet as a creative person too. I like that. Nice. And actually, I am really clear in the book to be really careful about screen-based arts engagement.

21:04I call it the ultra processed food of the arts world, which is probably a little bit rude. But the reason is, when we look at the evidence base, actually, we tend to see diluted benefits for many of the health outcomes. So, for example, we see lower emotional benefits from screen-based versus non-screen-based engagements. We see lower social benefits, which is not particularly surprising. It is different interacting in real life with people. And we also see that the cognitive benefits just are not as strong. So it's just a kind of warning of being offline and in real life wherever you can, but obviously accepting that there are still some benefits.

21:38And sometimes when the screen-based is the best way to reach people and the best opportunity to break down the barriers. Like you're eating creative veggies, but you're deep frying them. Okay. So you're not getting the full thing. One last question I had was, what's your favorite like practical, actionable piece of advice for people that want to fit this into their day in a way that's going to make the biggest impact? I'd say in that case, go for a swap. So on your way to work, if you're normally someone that scrolls the news, well, read a book, like use that as your book reading time. If you're someone who meets up with friends for drinks or dinner, why not meet up and go to a gig or meet up in a gallery so that you've got that arts engagement interwoven with a behavior you're already doing.

22:22And even really simple ones, like if you have an alarm clock in the morning, swap that to a piece of music that really sets the mood that you want to have when you first get up. Like it sounds so trivial, but actually that's something that could really affect your stress levels and your mood on waking, which could actually influence how you then feel and how you then cope with everything that comes your way during the day. I love that. And I love all the work you're doing. It feels very, very important to me and I'm sure important to the listeners. What is the best place to follow along with your work and check out the book?

22:53Well, I'd say you can look for ArtCure online. And also we've got so many ArtCure events coming up in the UK, the US and online as well. So I can share a link with you that people can follow and come along in person if they want to chat more. Fantastic. I'll put all those links in the show notes. Thanks, Daisy, for taking the time. It's a pleasure.

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24:13A couple nights prior, we had the edamame stir fry with this amazing gochujang aioli. It was vegetarian, but super flavorful and filling, and just I absolutely loved it. Nothing hits like home cooking. Go to hellofresh.com slash peptalk10fm. That's hellofresh.com slash peptalk10fm. Now to get 10 free meals plus a Nutribullet Ultra Plus 2-in-1 compact kitchen system. It's a$189.99 value on your third box. Free meals applied as a discount on the first box. New subscribers only, varies by plan. Disclaimer, must order the third box by May 31st, 2026. As a neurodivergent creative, I am always trying to strike a better balance between creating versus just consuming.

25:06That's why Dr. Anna Lemke's class, Dopamine Take Your Brain Back on Masterclass, piqued my interest. She is such a compelling communicator and one of the things that really hit me fresh was this idea that you want to embrace more things that make you feel uncomfortable up front but great afterwards versus great instantly but bad afterwards. This insight really inspired me to action because this is exactly why I want to create more than I scroll. I am no creative prodigy or business genius, but lifelong learning has been a game changer for me. Masterclass makes it possible to learn from the best in the world at any time with video and audio only mode.

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26:24All right. It's time for our creative call to adventure. You know, we don't like to just get you pepped out of your mind and then send you on your way. We want to give you something you can do that will actually make a difference in your creative journey. This week, it's called swapping. It's exactly what Daisy was just talking about. What could you swap out? Could you swap the screen for something else either in your creative practice or in your creative consumption? For me, this has looked like about a month ago, I swapped out writing on my phone for writing in a journal. Long time listeners will know I used to do all of my writing in a bathtub.

27:07Don't worry, I'm still taking baths and showers more than any human needs. I'm constantly dripping in sudsy waters but that is not any of your damn concern what I am trying to talk about is this swap that I made I started doing morning pages and I usually a lot of my like writing and podcast planning and stuff like that starts in my phone and then over the past month, I've experimented with doing that all in a journal. And so I'll do three pages every morning with my morning coffee and not in water because that doesn't make any sense. And I've actually started. The other thing I've done is because I'm not in water, I can go put one side of a vinyl on and I've started buying instrumental records.