Dana Foundation Blog

Live Chat Tomorrow: “Do the Arts Make Us Smarter?”

At 3pm EST, Thursday, March 14, Science magazine will be running a free live chat called Do the Arts Make Us Smarter?, exploring the effects of arts education on the brain. Moderated by Science staff writer Emily Underwood, guests will be Daniel Levitin, who runs the Lab for Music Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at McGill University, and Keith Oatley, a psychologist at the University of Toronto who studies the effect of fiction on our emotions.

What sorts of questions will they answer? How about: Does learning the violin actually increase IQ or translate to better grades? Can drawing help students learn geometry? What other benefits can the arts provide, both in and beyond the classroom?

For those of you can’t tune in live, it will be archived on that same web page.

Chuck Close SfN Lecture

An artist who can’t recognize faces paints portraits. To most, this would seem ridiculous, perhaps impossible. To Chuck Close, the artist, it is natural.

“I don’t care about landscapes or apples. I care about people. I have no memory of faces in three dimensions,” said Close, who has prosopagnosia, or “face blindness.” At times, Close couldn’t recognize the woman he had lived with for years. But once he paints someone, he can remember their face well enough to identify them in real life. And that is why he does it.

Can the Arts Contribute to Healthier Aging?

On September 14^th, The National Academies of Sciences (NAS) hosted the workshop, “Research Gaps and Opportunities for Exploring the Relationship of the Arts to Health and Well-Being in Older Adults,” in collaboration with the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and three divisions of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The D.C. workshop featured experts from the health and arts fields, who discussed current arts and aging research, and the need for increased exploration.

From the Archives: Why the Arts Matter

The Dana Foundation has long been interested in education and the arts. The advent of the field of neuroeducation, or mind, brain, and education science, led to several free Dana publications, which are still available online and in print.

One of these resources, Neuroeducation: Learning, Arts, and the Brain, published in 2009, reprinted a keynote address given by Dana Alliance Member Jerome Kagan, Ph.D., of Harvard University. Kagan spoke to the educators attending a summit co-sponsored by The Johns Hopkins University School of Education’s Neuro-Education Initiative on “Why the Arts Matter.”

Posner receives presidential regard

Next Tuesday, cognitive neuroscientist Michael Posner will be one of nine researchers this year to be awarded the National Medal of Science, the highest honor given by the U.S. government to scientists, educators and inventors. He wrote about his recent research in this month’s Cerebrum story, “ How Arts Training Improves Attention and Cognition.”

He also took part in the Dana Foundation’s Arts & Cognition Consortium, which in March 2008 reported evidence of close links between training in the arts and improvement in certain cognitive areas, such as memory, self control and attention. He is a strong advocate for spreading the word about what we are have discovered about the brain and learning to the public and to policy-makers, including coming here to the Dana Center in Washington, D.C., in 2008 to talk about the consortium studies [see videocast].

I last saw him this May in Baltimore during the Learning, Arts, and the Brain summit, sharing his research and participating in the small-group brainstorming sessions with educators, arts advocates and state and regional government leaders. The teachers and advocates at my table were quite taken with him, especially his easy style and clear delivery that made the top-flight research understandable, helping them to see clearly what we’ve learned about learning and the brain and what we do not yet know.

My table-mates also commented on the discipline of research in general and on how careful he and the other scientists were to claim only and exactly what they could verify, unlike the intuitive and anecdotal reporting education researchers often rely on. Transferring a more rigorous research approach may be one of the first goals of people developing the nascent field of neuroeducation, which combines neuroscience, psychology and education to build improved teaching methods and curricula.

—Nicky Penttila