Art is your emotion flowing in a river of imagination
~ Devin
Art is a concept; it doesn’t need to take shape to exist and it is intrinsically linked to our human nature. After all, art is but the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power. Thus, anything resulting from the creativity of man is ought to be called art. Humans have created visual productions since the dawn of times: painting on cave walls, creating jewelleries and piece of clothing. Art has evolved as humans did, benefiting from the growing complexity and sophistication of our tools. It can now take the form of paintings, sculptures, or even edifices.
Art has the ability to travel through time and reach us, here and now, allowing us to marvel at the genius of who created it. Looking at a piece of art, a painting for instance, can impact your brain in unexpected ways. It can attract your attention by the use of colours (or the absence of it), it can bring back memories or feelings, it can make you travel through time and space more surely than any time capsule yet to be invented. It affects everybody in different ways, but it does affect us all.
Our brain is a clever thing, trying to recognise shapes and faces in everything we look at, trying to make sense to what we see. Our brain is trained to look for familiar shapes or outlines in every object we encounter, no matter how incomplete or abstract it is. And the sane occurs when looking at a piece of art: we try to make sense to what we are looking at, to understand the different elements composing it. We can all see something different in the sane piece of art, it can talk to us in various way, and because each individual experience with art is unique, everybody’s right in their perception. What it does to us all is talked to our emotion… and increase the blood flow to the brain! Research showed that looking at a piece of art can affect us in a similar fashion than when looking upon the face a loved one.
You can literally fall in love with a piece of art. Your brain doesn’t seem to know the difference: a beautiful picture or a masterpiece will induce the secretion of dopamine in the brain, one of the “feel good” hormone, leading to intense joy and great pleasure. Dopamine is not only responsible for experienced pleasure, but it also controls the release of other hormones and confers motivational salience to events (i.e., it signals the perceived motivational desirability or aversiveness of an outcome), leading in turn to approach/retreat behaviours. Dopamine is thus responsible for more than just pleasure, it is responsible for engaging into pleasurable activities or preventing you from getting harmed… And it goes nuts in museums!
True story – research have showed that the art experience is enhanced when in museums compared to virtual exhibitions. Now it is not due to the museum itself, but to putting art in context. When you go to a museum, you’re goal it to see some form of art: your dopamine level raises, and you tend to remember better the different pieces you saw than when you look at it on a computer. It is unclear at the moment if this is due to the fact that museums are generally a piece of art themselves (altars to the glory of art), or to the gathering of pieces of art in a same physical space. Food for thoughts.
And this is just what’s happening when you look at art: dopamine is released in your brain, you feel like you’re in love, emotions arise within you, your memory is juggled… Imagine what happens when you start creating something.
Expressing your creativity to “do some art” has been shown to increase the level of functional connectivity within your brain, i.e. the amount of bridges between different areas of the brain that ought to work together for a shared goal. So, when you engage in creative activity, you create more bridges within your brain; more bridges mean that the information can travel faster and more efficiently within your brain. Moreover, creating art also increase the activation of the visual cortex, one of the parts of the brain involved in treating the visual information (making sense to what you see). Thus, in a similar fashion to physical exercising being good for your body, letting loose your creativity is good for your brain, keeping it sharp and well-functioning.
Counter-intuitive fact about creativity (at least it was counterintuitive for me): a study has showed that you are the most creative… when you are the least “well-functioning”! Let me explain: you probably have heard about night owl and early larks, different types of people with peak of activity respectively in the afternoon/evening or in the morning. Well it seems that night owls are more creative in the morning and early larks in the evening!
It seems to be due to the fact that creativity has nothing to do with focus or reason; on the contrary, unfocused, un-inhibited, approach are usually the most creative ones! And when is your inhibitory system weak and your mind all over the place? When you’re not fully there, i.e. when your brain is not at the top-most level, i.e. at your least optimal time of functioning.
Engaging in creative activities also seem to help deal with daily stress: taking your mind off things, taking a step back, coming up with unexpected solution. When you create (paint, draw, crochet, write, colour, you name it!), you have to focus on the task at hand, leaving space for your brain to process all that has happened and the various sources of stress. IT helps you take a time-off your daily concerns, to get back to it with a rested mind, helping you to deal with everything in a more mindful manner.
Art is a concept, and like all concept, you are free to make it yours. Let your creative spirit off the hook once in a while, for creativity is good for you. And creativity knows no limit but the one you create.
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