Hello world! My first blog post on the new site and, as fate would have it, I happened to get the opportunity to attend a panel last night run by the University of Sydney, part of Sydney Ideas. The panel included both artists and scientists who shared their research and experiences.
The question: Art and neuroplasticity: are they linked?
Answer: Yes.
Well that was easy, you're welcome.
If you'd like more detail though, here are some of the most useful and interesting things I took from the panel as a music educator.
Panelists:
Associate Professor Elizabeth Scott (Director of Uspace)
Professor Sharon Naismith (Clinical neuropsychologist and expert in dementia)
Gil Nicol (Museum of Contemporary Art Director of Audience Engagement)
Samantha Meers AO (Executive Deputy Chairman of the Nelson Meers Group)
Bernadette Harvey (Soloist and chamber musician, senior lecturer at Sydney Conservatorium of music.
Now for my thoughts.
Music teachers are constantly defending the validity of their subject. We have known for some time that music changes the very structure of our brains, and I think one pitfall that's easy to succumb to when defending ourselves is to attempt to align the arts with values of the past. Yes, music makes you better at maths. Yes, engaging with aural skills helps learn languages more efficiently, but why must we always validate music against other subjects at school as if it were not enough on its own? By the time students reach year nine and ten, most of the maths they learn in class is never used again. Does that make the classes useless? Absolutely not. When it comes to maths, most adults have little difficulty understanding that the mere process of learning complex formulae and their application is enough to be a vital part of a teenager's cognitive development. In this case it's less about the content as it is about the skills being learned. How to study, how to understand, how to reach conclusions when presented with difficult problems. So how is music any different? Why is it that when presented with a list of subjects and asked to prioritise them, schools and governments often place music near the bottom of the list? Useless, impractical, irrelevant to the 'real world' as though a student's mind isn't just as much (if not more) part of their reality as their external lives.
The skills that are often found in artists are things like: Appreciation of beauty and joy, self-awareness, heightened empathy, confidence, and resilience. The panelists spoke of all these in detail and outlined their research in this field. Without rambling on for too long, I'd like to say firstly that I believe appreciation of beauty is a skill that is slowly declining, with exponentially increasing statistics of mood disorders and lifestyles that demand constant activity (which is not necessarily the same thing as productivity), and a system of standardised testing which punishes difference. Art is the antithesis to all of that. Samantha Meers described it as, "a safe space to experience otherness."
As artists, we can create a world where there is no wrong or right, merely interesting, beautiful, or any number of far more useful adjectives. As teachers, we try to build a small pocket of this world for our students, but it can be difficult in the system we have. That's why teachers have a responsibility to always strive for change, to not settle for what we are told we should settle for, because we lead by example and we all want our students to demand more from the world than mediocrity.
You can read about Sharon and Gil's research collaboration at the MCA here.