Art Engages the Social brain

I reported in last week’s Quick Hits on how engaging in the arts has a relationship with self-control and avoidance of disagreeable and criminal behaviour and that is why this impressive piece of research published in February caught my eye.

In this Janneke van Leeuwen et al. map different types of art engagement to a detailed neural map of social centres. These types of engagement range from perceptual analysis, to animated dynamics (i.e. movement), to symbolic meaning, and personal significance.

I was impressed by the depth of this paper. Basically, what we can see is that each of these separate aspects of interacting with art activate networks in the brain that are strongly associated with social functioning.

In some respects, this should be actually logical — the arts are after all incredibly humanistic and engage our emotions and aesthetics.

This piece of research show to what extent this is so — all aspects of engaging with art engage multiple parts of the brain and recruits the same brain networks as those involved in complex social behaviour.

Good to know!