Art & Longevity
What Your Body Does In Front of a Painting.
And Why It Seems To Add Years.
Something happens in you when you stand in front of art. Something different happens when the art leaves you cold. Both are measurable, both have been measured, and one of the strangest findings in public health is that people who keep doing this die later. Not by a little.
I absolutely love art. Okay, that was the whole blogpost, no need to say more.
Kidding, of course. But I do love art so much that it moves every fibre of my being. Not every kind of art, obviously. There are differences between each artist, each work, each genre, era, form. Truly, blueprints they are.
Recently I was wondering what that phenomenon in my body actually is. When I look at art I love, and when I look at art I do not. Both of them provoke a sensation. Different sensations, but sensations all the same. Something is happening in there and I wanted to know what.
For as long as I can remember I have drawn. Figures, sketches, fantasy, technical drawings, daydreamed things, inventions, other realms and other worlds. Painted, too. It is safe to say I am fairly creative, and still am. Anyone who has seen my new social media series, The Art of Female Health: Diaries, will have noticed the women's faces on canvas in the background. I painted those. Colourful, yes.
So I went looking for the mechanism behind a feeling I have had my entire life. And the first thing I found was not a brain scan. It was a mortality table.
In 2019, two researchers at University College London followed 6,710 adults over fifty for fourteen years and asked one question at the start: how often do you go to a museum, a gallery, an exhibition, the theatre, a concert? Then they counted who was still alive. People who went every few months or more had a 31 percent lower risk of dying during those fourteen years than people who never went. After adjusting for wealth, health, education, mobility, cognition and social contact. [1]
I want to be careful with that number, and I will be, further down. But it sent me into the neuroscience, and the neuroscience turned out to answer my original question almost exactly. There is a specific, measurable difference between what your brain does with art that moves you and art that does not. It is not a difference of degree. It is a difference of kind.
This is part one of three. Here, the body and the lifespan. Next, why any of this evolved at all. Then, what art and science have actually been doing to each other for four hundred years.
Loved, Neutral, Repelled
My actual question, answered by the scanner. Switch between the three states.
Visual art findings come from fMRI work by Edward Vessel and colleagues at NYU. Reward and chill findings come from PET and fMRI work on music by Valorie Salimpoor and Robert Zatorre at McGill. The two modalities are not interchangeable, and each panel says which one it is drawing on. [3][4][5]
Start with the thing that surprised me most, because it reframes the question I was asking.
Your brain does not process moving art and unmoving art on the same continuum. Edward Vessel, Gabrielle Starr and Nava Rubin at New York University put people in a scanner, showed them paintings, and asked one question after each: how strongly does this move you, on a scale of one to four. Three different response patterns came out of the same experiment. The visual regions at the back of the brain rose in a straight line with the rating, more moving meant more activation. The striatum, the reward structure, also responded in a line, but it sat below baseline for the paintings rated one and two. And the frontal regions did something else entirely. They did not rise gradually. They were flat across ratings one, two and three, and then stepped up sharply only at four. [3]
The region doing the stepping is part of the default mode network. The anterior medial prefrontal cortex is one of the core nodes of the network your brain runs when it is not attending to the outside world: remembering, imagining, thinking about yourself. It is normally suppressed the moment you engage with anything external, including a painting. Vessel and colleagues found it was suppressed for most artworks, exactly as expected. For the artworks rated most moving, the suppression lifted. Their reading: at that intensity, the artwork stops being processed as an external object and starts being processed as something continuous with the self. [3]
That is the cleanest answer I have found to what I was asking. Art I do not like is being handled as information about the world. Art that moves me is being handled as information about me.
Which explains something else that used to bother me: why I cannot argue anyone into loving a painting.
Taste for abstract images is almost entirely individual. Taste for real-world images is largely shared. Vessel and Rubin ran a straightforward study asking people to rate images, then measured how much observers agreed with each other. For photographs of real-world scenes, agreement was high. Faces, landscapes, recognisable places, we mostly converge. For abstract images, agreement collapsed close to zero. Each person's preference was essentially their own. [4]
So when a painting does nothing for me and everything for you, that is not a failure of taste on either side. For a large class of images, there is no shared answer to converge on. Which means the canon someone hands you is not a map of your reward system. It is a map of theirs.
Art you are indifferent to is processed as something out there. Art that moves you is processed as something in here. The switch between those two is not gradual. Your brain makes a decision, and then it changes the category.
The Encounter
From the first hundred milliseconds to forty-five minutes later. Drag through it.
Each step carries the modality it was measured in. Visual art and music are studied with different tools and do not produce identical findings, so the badges matter more than usual here.
Here is where it gets uncomfortable for anyone who likes their evidence tidy, including me. The neuroscience above is mechanism. The longevity data is epidemiology. They have never been linked in the same study, and I am not going to pretend they have been. What we have instead is a set of large, long cohorts that keep finding the same shape.
The Swedish cohort found it first, in 1996. Lars Olov Bygren and colleagues at Umeå University interviewed a national sample of Swedish adults about cultural attendance, reading and music-making, then followed them. People who rarely attended cultural events had higher mortality than those who attended often, after controlling for the usual suspects. A fourteen-year follow-up in the same population reported relative mortality risks of 1.42 for rarely visiting museums and 1.14 for rarely visiting art exhibitions, compared with frequent visitors. [2][6]
The English cohort found it again in 2019, with better adjustment. Daisy Fancourt and Andrew Steptoe used the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing: 6,710 adults aged fifty and over, fourteen years of follow-up. Engaging with receptive arts once or twice a year was associated with 14 percent lower mortality risk. Every few months or more, 31 percent lower. The absolute numbers were 6 deaths per 1,000 person-years in the never group, against 2.4 in the frequent group. They adjusted for demographics, socioeconomic status, health, cognition, mobility, and social and civic engagement, and the association survived. [1]
The same cohort has produced two more findings in the same direction. Fancourt and Urszula Tymoszuk followed 2,148 older adults for ten years and found a dose-response relationship with depression: cultural engagement every few months was associated with 32 percent lower odds of developing depression, once a month or more with 48 percent lower odds. [7] Fancourt, Steptoe and Dorina Cadar followed 3,911 adults for ten years and found that visiting museums every few months or more was associated with a dementia incidence rate ratio of 0.51, with a confidence interval running from 0.32 to 0.83, after adjusting for education, wealth, depression, cardiovascular health, eyesight, hearing and membership of social clubs. [8]
And there is one place where the evidence stops being observational, because someone ran an actual intervention.
Forty-five minutes of making art lowered cortisol in about three quarters of participants, regardless of skill. Girija Kaimal and colleagues at Drexel University gave 39 adults aged eighteen to fifty-nine free access to markers, paper, clay and collage materials for forty-five minutes, with no instruction and no brief. Salivary cortisol was measured before and after. Roughly 75 percent showed a drop. The remaining quarter went up, which Kaimal read as engagement rather than distress. Prior art experience made no difference at all to the result. [9]
That last clause is the one I keep returning to. Not being good at it did not reduce the effect. The intervention was making, not making well.
The Dose
Three outcomes, three cohorts, one dial. Read the panel underneath before you read the numbers.
All three findings come from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, which means they share a population and, to some extent, share their limitations. [1][7][8]
The reward circuit art runs on is hormone-modulated in women, and nobody has asked what that does to aesthetic experience
In 2007, Jean-Claude Dreher and Karen Berman at the National Institute of Mental Health scanned women at two points in the menstrual cycle while they anticipated and received rewards. During the follicular phase, when oestrogen rises unopposed by progesterone, reward anticipation produced greater activation in the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex. In the mid-luteal phase, when progesterone is high, that reactivity dropped. They also found that women and men did not recruit the same regions for the same task: men activated the ventral striatum, women the emotion-processing regions. [10]
Now put that next to the aesthetics literature. Dopamine release in the striatum is the documented mechanism for musical pleasure. The striatum grades visual artworks linearly by how much they move you. These are the same circuits Dreher measured shifting across a cycle.
Which means it is reasonable to ask whether your response to art changes across your cycle. Whether the painting that undid you in week two does less in week four. Whether the chills come more easily at one point than another. I cannot tell you, because the study does not exist. It has been nineteen years since the reward finding was published, and aesthetic neuroscience has not gone and looked.
This is not an exotic omission. It is the standard one. A field measures a circuit, another field measures the same circuit being modulated by ovarian hormones, and the two never meet, because sex as a biological variable was not a requirement when most of this work was designed. And so half the population reads findings about their own reward system with no idea whether the numbers were taken on a day when their hormones looked anything like today's.
Meanwhile the longevity data has its own version of the same blind spot. The ELSA cohorts adjust for sex. They do not ask whether the effect differs by it.
Every longevity number in this post is observational, and I am not going to dress it up
Fancourt and Steptoe said it themselves: this is an observational study and cause was not established. People who go to galleries may simply be healthier, wealthier, more mobile and better connected than people who do not, in ways no statistical adjustment fully removes. That is the residual confounding problem, and it does not go away by adding another covariate.
There is also reverse causation. Early, undiagnosed illness makes you less likely to go out and more likely to die, which would produce exactly this pattern with no causal arrow from art at all. The ELSA authors tested for this by excluding early deaths and the association held, which helps, but it does not settle it.
What would settle it is a randomised trial: allocate people to regular arts engagement or not, follow them for years, count. That trial has not been run, and for a fourteen-year mortality endpoint it may never be. So the honest description of the evidence is a consistent, dose-responsive association across multiple large cohorts in two countries, with a plausible mechanism, and no proof of causation. That is genuinely a strong observational signal. It is not the same thing as a treatment.
The cortisol study is a real intervention, which is why I flagged it separately. It is also 39 people, a single session, and one hormone measured twice. Treat it as a demonstration that the effect is producible, not as a dose.
And the neuroscience: sample sizes in aesthetic fMRI work are small, the visual art findings and the music findings come from different labs and different methods, and the interpretation that the default mode network activation means the artwork has become self-relevant is an interpretation. A good one, well argued. Still an interpretation.
Nothing in this literature rewards the profound annual pilgrimage to a major museum. The dose-response runs on regularity: every few months clears the threshold in all three ELSA analyses, monthly does better for depression. A small local gallery you pass on a Tuesday counts the same as a blockbuster exhibition in the data.
Agreement between observers collapses for abstract images and holds for real-world ones. The practical reading is that standing in front of something you are supposed to admire, waiting to feel it, is not the same activity as finding the thing that lifts your medial prefrontal cortex out of suppression. Only one of those is the experience the research is measuring. Follow what actually moves you, including if it is unfashionable.
Forty-five minutes with markers and clay, no brief, no product. Three quarters of participants dropped cortisol, and prior experience predicted nothing. If you have been telling yourself you are not creative enough to make anything, the one measured intervention in this entire post is indifferent to that.
The ELSA models adjust for social and civic engagement and the association survives, but going to a gallery is rarely a solitary act and the cohorts cannot fully separate the art from the company, the walking, the getting out of the house, the having a reason to. That is a limitation of the evidence. It is also, possibly, not a problem: the intervention may simply be the whole package.
I started this wanting to know what the sensation in my body is. I have a better answer now than I expected, and it is more specific than I expected too. When a work does nothing for me, my brain treats it as an object in a room. When one undoes me, a network associated with self-referential thought comes off suppression and the thing stops being out there. The sensation I have been noticing my whole life is, at least in part, the moment my brain reclassifies a painting as part of me.
That is also, I suspect, why the drawing never stopped. The figures, the invented worlds, the technical sketches of things that do not exist. I was not making art for anyone. I was running a process that, as it turns out, drops cortisol in three quarters of people who try it and does not care whether they are any good.
The women's faces behind me in the Diaries series are not set decoration. They are, by a slightly ridiculous coincidence, the intervention. I painted them because painting is what I do when I need to think. That the research now tells me this may be doing something for how long I live is a lovely bonus, and I am going to hold it loosely, because the evidence is observational and I would rather tell you that than sell you a longer life in a paint set.
What I will say without hedging is this. You already know which works do it to you. That knowledge is not trivial taste. It is your own reward system telling you where it lives.
This is part one. The next two go backwards and outwards.
- Art and longevity. What happens in the body, and what the cohorts found. You just read it.
- Art and evolution. Why a species under selection pressure ever developed a reward response to ochre on a cave wall, and what the competing theories actually claim.
- Art and science. The four hundred year argument between them, the anatomical drawing, the scientific illustration, and what each discipline still refuses to learn from the other.
The chapter on the nervous system in The Art of Female Health goes into the reward and stress pathways this post only touches, and into how they behave differently in a female body across a cycle and a lifetime. If this piece left you with more questions than it closed, that is where the rest of it lives. nammu.academy/book
References
- Fancourt, D., & Steptoe, A. (2019). The art of life and death: 14 year follow-up analyses of associations between arts engagement and mortality in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing. BMJ, 367, l6377. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l6377
- Bygren, L. O., Konlaan, B. B., & Johansson, S.-E. (1996). Attendance at cultural events, reading books or periodicals, and making music or singing in a choir as determinants for survival: Swedish interview survey of living conditions. BMJ, 313(7072), 1577–1580. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.313.7072.1577
- Vessel, E. A., Starr, G. G., & Rubin, N. (2012). The brain on art: Intense aesthetic experience activates the default mode network. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6, 66. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00066
- Vessel, E. A., & Rubin, N. (2010). Beauty and the beholder: Highly individual taste for abstract, but not real-world images. Journal of Vision, 10(2), 18. https://doi.org/10.1167/10.2.18
- Salimpoor, V. N., Benovoy, M., Larcher, K., Dagher, A., & Zatorre, R. J. (2011). Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music. Nature Neuroscience, 14(2), 257–262. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2726
- Konlaan, B. B., Bygren, L. O., & Johansson, S.-E. (2000). Visiting the cinema, concerts, museums or art exhibitions as determinant of survival: A Swedish fourteen-year cohort follow-up. Scandinavian Journal of Public Health, 28(3), 174–178. https://doi.org/10.1177/14034948000280030501
- Fancourt, D., & Tymoszuk, U. (2019). Cultural engagement and incident depression in older adults: Evidence from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing. British Journal of Psychiatry, 214(4), 225–229. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.2018.267
- Fancourt, D., Steptoe, A., & Cadar, D. (2018). Cultural engagement and cognitive reserve: Museum attendance and dementia incidence over a 10-year period. British Journal of Psychiatry, 213(5), 661–663. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.2018.129
- Kaimal, G., Ray, K., & Muniz, J. (2016). Reduction of cortisol levels and participants' responses following art making. Art Therapy, 33(2), 74–80. https://doi.org/10.1080/07421656.2016.1166832
- Dreher, J.-C., Schmidt, P. J., Kohn, P., Furman, D., Rubinow, D., & Berman, K. F. (2007). Menstrual cycle phase modulates reward-related neural function in women. PNAS, 104(7), 2465–2470. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0605569104