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Can Art Make You Really Happier?

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Feeling down in the dumps? Get thee to an art gallery and gaze upon your favorite artwork. Research shows it stimulates pleasure points in the brain — and the more beautiful you think the paintings are, the greater the buzz.

You first enjoy your ability to solve problems through creativity. The solutions you provide may also come with monetary rewards. This creativity will also send more information into your brain, leaving you more energetic and innovative. All these are ways of deriving happiness from art.

The Art of Lifting Moods

Researchers at the University of London scanned the brains of 21 subjects while they viewed paintings by Rembrandt, Monet, Cezanne, and other masters. What they observed was that blood flow to the part of the brain that registers pleasure —the “medial orbitofrontal cortex” — increased sharply and immediately when the participants saw something they liked.  (It also spiked with they listened to music they liked.)

The journal article is called, “Toward a Brain-Based Theory of Beauty.”

What boosted moods the most? In the experiment, the biggest brain spikes associated with happier moods were stimulated by works by

  • English landscape master John Constable
  • French neoclassical portrait artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
  • 17th-century Italian classical artist Guido Reni

By contrast, moodier paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, Honoré Daumier, and the Flemish artist named Massys resulted in smaller blips.

Beautiful Brains

“We are giving scientific truth to what has been known for a long time – that beautiful paintings make us feel much better,” said Professor Semir Zeki, chair in neuroaesthetics at University College London, who conducted the experiment, and spoke with a London reporter. “But we didn’t realize until we did these studies just how powerful the effect on the brain is.”

Best of all, you don’t need to be an art connoisseur to reap the benefits. However, the people in the London study were picked at random and had little or no prior knowledge of art. You just have to be open to what registers as beautiful to you whether that’s Rockwell or Rembrandt.

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