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Arts and Creativity

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Arts and Creativity

Art on the Spectrum

Showcasing the works and stories of talented, under-the-radar artists with developmental disabilities.
Watercolor effect brain
Arts and Creativity

Connecting the Dots: New Insights into Creativity and the Brain

“Ordinary” mental processes combine in unexpected ways across the brain when we are tapping our creativity.
Arts and Creativity

Music as the Brain’s Universal Language

Q&A with with Charles Limb, M.D.

Dana Foundation grantee Charles Limb ponders the question: Could music be the mind’s universal language?
Series of slides
Arts and Creativity

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.
singer with standup bass
Arts and Creativity

Musical Creativity and the Brain

Researchers are now using brain imaging to study the neural underpinnings of spontaneous artistic creativity, from jazz riffs to freestyle rap. So far, they have found that brain areas deactivated during improvisation are also at rest during dreaming and meditation, while activated areas include those controlling language and sensorimotor skills. Even with relatively few completed studies, researchers have concluded that musical creativity clearly cannot be tied to just one brain area or process.
Arts and Creativity

The Neuroscience of Improvisation

Improvisation “shows us what the mind can do,”

Arts and Creativity

Six Good Reasons for Advocating the Importance of Arts in School

Keynote address by Jerome Kagan at the conference "Neuroeducation: Learning, Arts, and the Brain"

Jerome Kagan, Ph.D., the Daniel and Amy Starch research professor of psychology, emeritus at Harvard University, is a pioneer in the field of developmental psychology. He has spent 45 years studying children and their development; his most recent work has been on temperaments in children. Dr. Kagan has shown that an infant’s temperament is stable […]

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