Art and Brain

Teasing Out Effects of Practice, Emotion in the Creative Brain

Studies asking musicians to improvise while having their brains scanned suggest that extended practice in being creative leads to less activity in some control-related brain regions and stronger network connections.

Music, Art, and Cognitive Benefit: Separating Fact from Fallacy

Dana grantee Elizabeth Spelke discusses her recent study on the effects of music classes on math abilities in children

Neuroeducation: Learning, Arts, and the Brain

Learning, Arts, and the Brain

The Neuroscience of Aesthetics

How does the brain process, respond to, and create art? Scientists and artists recently spent two days in Baltimore talking about how to start answering such questions.

Six Good Reasons for Advocating the Importance of Arts in School

The argument for arts and music in the curric­ulum does not have to be sentimental, but can rest on pragmatic grounds, argues Jerome Kagan, emeritus professor of psychology at Harvard and a pioneer in the field of developmental psychology.

How Arts Training Improves Attention and Cognition

Sustained training in music, dance or other arts strengthens the brain’s attention system, which in turn may improve cognition more generally. Evidence for such cognitive “transfer” is accumulating.

About Faces, in Art and in the Brain

Did the human brain evolve to reflect the life-and-death importance of perceiving and reading faces?