Art comforts, elevates the spirit and affirms life and hope. Consider creativity a wellness practice. The arts are important for our lives because beauty has a powerful role. When we are involved in creativity, we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life. Creativity produces mental wealth. 

 

Let’s take a look at just one of the arts. Music. Music impacts brain function by reducing stress, pain and symptoms of depression as well as improving cognitive and motor skills, spatial-temporal learning and neurogenesis, which is the brain’s ability to produce neurons. 

 

Musical training strengthens the brain’s executive function. Executive function covers critical tasks like processing and retaining information, controlling behavior, making decisions and problem solving. 

 

After James Allison, a scientist and musician, won the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize in Medicine for a major breakthrough in cancer research, he shared, "My lab has been so well-tuned it feels like a really good band.” After I read about his approach in the lab, I couldn’t help but hear the music improvisation. He hadn’t consciously known where he was going with all of this experimentation and suddenly they had arrived at a result that had cured cancer in mice.

 

 

 

Einstein had a mind that came up with some ideas that would have to wait 100 years to be proven correct. Einstein was an accomplished violinist. He thought about science in terms of images and intuitions often drawn from his experience as a musician. Then later converted these into logic, words and mathematics. He wanted his science to be unified, harmonious, expressed simply and to convey a sense of beauty in form.

 

It’s your authentic expression through art making, music, song, movement, writing and other forms of art-based imagination that makes creativity central to a wellness practice. 

 

Want answers? Send your questions, comments and thoughts about life to universe@thelinlife.com

 

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