How learning artistic skills alters the brain New research finds neural changes not only reflecting increased technical capacities, but also enhanced creativity You Might Also Like Are artists ? Is the idea that artistry is , or perhaps one's soul, really true? A suggests otherwise. "Creativity is another concept that is often thought of as something we are either born with or will never have," says Dartmouth College psychologist , lead author of a paper published in the journal NeuroImage. "Our data clearly refute this notion." Schlegel and his colleagues report that taking an introductory class in painting or drawing literally alters students' brains. What's more, these training-induced changes didn't only improve the fine motor control needed for sophisticated sketching; they also boosted the students' creative thinking. Start doing the work, and the brain responds, allowing one to build and retain not just technical knowledge, but also the imaginative capacity needed to utilize it fully. The study featured 35 college undergraduates, 17 of whom took a introductory course in observational drawing or painting. All underwent monthly brain scans using fMRI technology. At the beginning and end of the study, all participants completed a standard test of creative thinking, which measures such factors as fluency, originality, and the creative use of imagery and language. During each of the monthly sessions, their brains were scanned under two conditions: as they "judged properties of illusory visual stimuli," a test designed to track the development of their perceptual abilities; and as they made "quick, 30-second gesture drawings based on observations of human figures." "We did not find any improvements in the art students' purely perceptual skills or related brain activity relative to a control group of students who did not study art," the researchers write. "We did, however, find that the art students improved in the ability to quickly translate observations of human figures into gesture drawings, and that fine-grained patterns of drawing-related neural activity in the cerebellum and cerebral cortex increasingly differentiated the art students from the control group over the course of the study." In other words, the researchers were able to watch as the students' brains adapted to learning new skills. But more importantly, they also observed changes in their prefrontal white matter that corresponded to an increase in their ability to think creatively. The art students specifically increased "their ability to think divergently, model systems and
How learning artistic skills alters the brain New research finds neural changes not only reflecting increased technical capacities, but also enhanced creativity You Might Also Like Are artists ? Is the idea that artistry is , or perhaps one's soul, really true? A suggests otherwise. "Creativity is another concept that is often thought of as something we are either born with or will never have," says Dartmouth College psychologist , lead author of a paper published in the journal NeuroImage. "Our data clearly refute this notion." Schlegel and his colleagues report that taking an introductory class in painting or drawing literally alters students' brains. What's more, these training-induced changes didn't only improve the fine motor control needed for sophisticated sketching; they also boosted the students' creative thinking. Start doing the work, and the brain responds, allowing one to build and retain not just technical knowledge, but also the imaginative capacity needed to utilize it fully. The study featured 35 college undergraduates, 17 of whom took a introductory course in observational drawing or painting. All underwent monthly brain scans using fMRI technology. At the beginning and end of the study, all participants completed a standard test of creative thinking, which measures such factors as fluency, originality, and the creative use of imagery and language. During each of the monthly sessions, their brains were scanned under two conditions: as they "judged properties of illusory visual stimuli," a test designed to track the development of their perceptual abilities; and as they made "quick, 30-second gesture drawings based on observations of human figures." "We did not find any improvements in the art students' purely perceptual skills or related brain activity relative to a control group of students who did not study art," the researchers write. "We did, however, find that the art students improved in the ability to quickly translate observations of human figures into gesture drawings, and that fine-grained patterns of drawing-related neural activity in the cerebellum and cerebral cortex increasingly differentiated the art students from the control group over the course of the study." In other words, the researchers were able to watch as the students' brains adapted to learning new skills. But more importantly, they also observed changes in their prefrontal white matter that corresponded to an increase in their ability to think creatively. The art students specifically increased "their ability to think divergently, model systems and
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