Resources
Arts, Education, the Brain, and Language
From the abstract: This study uses neuroscientific methods to examine whether there are cognitive differences between performing arts and non-performing arts students and among students studying different performing arts, in particular between music students and …
Arts Organizations and Public Health: Developing Relationships and Programs to Address Local Health Priorities
Partners for Livable Communities (Partners) releases, “Arts Organizations and Public Health,” a guide to creating partnerships between art and health organizations. This primer was designed for the arts organization that wishes to initiate programming focused …
Art Therapy: Enhancing the Lives of Older Adults
From the toolkit: Art can be a powerful activity for older adults. For many seniors art is a lifelong passion, for others, art is a hobby that they never had the time to pursue. No …
Art as Therapy: How to Age Creatively
A new exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., showcases the work of elderly artists with memory loss and other chronic conditions.
Is It Really Too Late to Learn New Skills?
From the article: You missed your chance to be a prodigy, but there’s still growth left for grownups. The joys—and occasional embarrassments—of being a novice could be an antidote to the strain of being a …
What Happens to Creativity as We Age?
From the article: How does the ability to come up with unusual ideas change as we grow older? Does it begin to flag in adolescence? Before then? To investigate these questions, we and our colleagues …
Does Creativity Decline with Age?
From the article: This question has attracted scientific research for more than a century. In fact, the first empirical study of this issue was published in 1835. Thus, I can offer a confident answer: not …
Alzheimer’s Poetry Project
From the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project (APP) site: The mission of the APP is to improve the quality of life of people living with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementia by facilitating creative expression through poetry. We …
Memory Loss Initiative
From the StoryCorps site: StoryCorps launched the Memory Loss Initiative to support and encourage people with various forms of memory loss to share their stories with loved ones and future generations.
Learning, Arts, and the Brain: The Dana Consortium Report on Arts and Cognition
From the Introduction: In 2004, the Dana Arts and Cognition Consortium brought together cognitive neuroscientists from seven universities across the United States to grapple with the question of why arts training has been associated with …