The brain, the body and the power of art

Once upon a time in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Dr Ying Wang gathered kawakawa leaves from her garden and dipped them in Chinese ink to make prints on fabric. The smell and feel of foliage native to her adopted home intertwined with the smell of the ink of her ancestors and her childhood land.

Ying then literally bound part of herself into the work by embroidering strands of her hair into the pattern of leaves. It was a moment of connection, of combination, of weaving her identity: of being her full self, of being Chinese in Aotearoa New Zealand.

“I’ve been here for more than two decades, but the sense of belonging sometimes is still quite shaky,” explains Ying, an arts therapist turned research fellow at the Centre for Arts and Social Transformation (CAST). “But in that moment of making art, I felt the peace of strongly bonding myself to this land and my distant birthland … So every time I look at that painting, it reminds me of that moment.”

Whether we’re making or simply appreciating art, such moments demonstrate its power to move us in mind – and also in body.

Take the experience of Professor of Art History Ngarino Ellis (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou). Co-author of Toi Te Mana, the first comprehensive history of Māori art, Ngarino describes how she is sometimes “completely overwhelmed” by an artwork. Or CAST director Professor Peter O’Connor, who is clear that the arts – particularly music – are “the first place we go to when crisis and disaster hit in our lives”. Or Ying, who sees “something happening magically” for people in arts therapy – a magic she is keen for us to understand systematically and scientifically, to guide future arts therapy.

It’s one of the reasons Ying was excited to join Professor of Psychology Paul Corballis and Professor of Art History Gregory Minissale as co-supervisor for psychology doctoral student Tamar Torrance, who is researching how our brain communicates with itself when we’re captivated by a work of visual art.

Response to any art is a complex phenomenon. It involves the ‘aesthetic triad’ of our senses, emotions and cognition (understanding) all interacting with each other. But neuroaesthetics – the field of neuroscience investigating what happens in the brain when we respond to the arts – has often looked at only one prong of this triad network, and/or only one part of the brain, and then tried to build a picture of everything that is happening with these composite puzzle pieces.

Gregory is not a fan of such “crude, reductionist methodologies”. “Art is so complex that some of the pieces just don’t add up,” he says. “What has been left out of the picture is emotion and tactility – the fact that human beings are not just parts of brains.” So Tamar has designed her research to consider activity across the brain and body, and to relate it to sensory, emotional and intellectual responses. It’s what Gregory calls a “whole all-round, three-dimensional embodied, complex approach”.

Your brain, and body, on art

Tamar is comparing the brainwaves of her research participants when they’re responding strongly to an artwork, with their brainwaves when they’re in front of an artwork that leaves them cold. The difference will show what happens – which parts of the brain communicate with each other – when the viewer has a ‘heightened aesthetic experience’. It doesn’t matter what the artworks are, and it doesn’t even matter if the viewer feels ecstatic, angry or sad – as long as they feel strongly about one artwork and unthrilled about another.

The most fun part of Tamar’s suite of experiments takes place in Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, before opening hours, in the corridor exhibition Gothic Returns: From Fuseli to Fomison. Tamar chose the exhibition because it includes a wide variety of (Western) artistic styles, so each viewer is likely to respond strongly to some artworks and not others; and because responses to the Gothic may include fear and horror. Unlike a lot of neuroaesthetics research, this project is not particularly interested in beauty (so 19th century), nor in the stress-reduction effect of certain types of art.

Part of Tamar’s experiment is comparing responses to artworks in the gallery to responses to the same artworks on a computer screen, and in virtual reality seen via a VR headset. Gallery staff have their own hypothesis: “We feel there’s something special about coming to the gallery,” says exhibition curator Sophie Matthiesson.

So here you are, sitting on an office chair that Tamar has adjusted until you’re at eye-level with a 1971 Tony Fomison painting of a man’s square, bald head – much larger than your own. Half the man’s face is missing; in its place is a skeletal sneer and an empty eye socket. Your communion with ‘Skull Face’ will last 60 seconds, before Tamar politely commands “gaze down”.

Then there are clipboard questions: How moved did you feel? (Repulsion is valid.) Did you experience a physical reaction? (Perhaps shivers down the spine.) How much did you relate it to other works of art? (Maybe you thought of other half-skull memento mori, or Marlon Brando as the sinister Kurtz in Apocalypse Now.) How important were the colours to you? How much did you lose track of time or get lost in thought? The questions are designed to detect how much the artwork changed your emotions, perceptions and understandings, and how much you were in a state of ‘flow’ or concentration.

So that the exertion of standing and walking does not mess up Tamar’s data, she wheels you to the next artwork – like an indulged patient or eccentric royalty. You stay sitting on your throne while looking at a total of 22 artworks. In your pocket is a portable electrocardiogram (ECG), recording your heartbeat.

Your crown – and this is the coolest, nerdiest bit – is an electroencephalogram or EEG cap studded with 64 electrodes detecting your brain’s electrical activity. The skull cap is hooked up to a bioelectrical signal amplifier used to turn up the volume on your faint brainwaves. That novel piece of kit sits on your chest and, like the ECG heartbeat recorder, it is connected to its own laptop sitting on a trolley. Tamar has another researcher helping her wrangle this whole rolling circus.

Later in the lab, Tamar uses the heartbeat information and questionnaires to identify the viewer’s highest and lowest responses. She then performs complex maths to work out which parts of the brain were responsible for which electrical impulses (the calculations are required as each signal “has to pass through a bunch of different tissues in the brain, so it’s very distorted by the time it reaches the sensors”). The methodology she’s using for this network neuroscience analysis is so technical and tricky that it is rarely used in neuroaesthetics.

Then she can finally compare the difference in brain excitement in response to the most stimulating artwork versus the least. She projects the EEG data into a structural model of the brain (a magnetic resonance imaging or MRI template) and voila! A map of the power of art on the human brain.

Tamar’s broad hypothesis is that the enrapturing art experience will involve far more “highly complex, intra-brain interactions” than the ‘meh’ experience. Neurons firing in excitement with each other – due to experiences that are “novel, impactful, meaningful, outside of the norm” – help increase our neuroplasticity. In other words, intense art experiences may help strengthen our brain’s ability to adapt and reorganise itself, to learn new information, and even to heal from injuries.

Meanwhile, pictures of brain excitement will be further evidence for the power of art. As someone who has studied art history, worked in galleries and enjoys the visual art world, Tamar is concerned about what she sees as a general “shift away from taking the arts seriously, toward seeing the arts as something that’s frivolous and self-indulgent and a bit wanky”. She hopes her research will help support the idea that art is powerful and art is for everyone.

Arts as imperative

That idea is a cornerstone for CAST. “The arts are a human right,” says Peter. “You can’t really be fully yourself if you’ve cut yourself off from the arts.”

Peter says that, contrary to prevailing ideology, kids in ‘arts-rich’ schools do better at literacy and numeracy.

“It’s really difficult in schools for children and teachers to be fully human if the arts aren’t there,” says Peter.

CAST’s Te Rito Toi website is full of artistic educational resources for children who are coming back to learning after having been affected by trauma; the best way back, says Peter, is through the arts.

He would know: he has led interactive theatre workshops in trauma zones, from post-earthquake Christchurch to Hawaii after the 2023 fires left large numbers of families homeless. He also led a team that created an arts-based resource about mental health that’s being used for 12,000 students in more than 300 schools around the country.

This isn’t arts as nice-to-have; this is arts as imperative: “a country that loses the arts loses itself”, says Peter.

Other researchers are also concerned the arts aren’t valued enough. Ying points out that despite its power, arts therapy is often treated as a “marginalised helping profession”. Professor of Health Psychology Elizabeth Broadbent observes that research about the potential benefits of art in health settings is “sort of a fringe area – it’s not like you’re testing a new drug” and that funding can be hard to obtain.

Several years ago, Elizabeth and Gregory teamed up with others (including then PhD student Mikaela Law) for a small study that found landscape artworks were more stimulating and reduced drowsiness after stress when compared with viewing scrambled images of the same artworks. Elizabeth and Mikaela (now Dr Law) later published a scoping review of studies looking at the effect of art on stress.

They found several studies did suggest certain types of art may be beneficial in certain circumstances – and they suggested viewer choice may also be important. But they also found the research area lacks large randomised controlled trials to pinpoint the effect and its size.

“A trial in a dentist setting would be quite nice,” says Elizabeth. “Half an hour in the chair, vary what’s on the ceiling, you could monitor heart rate and blood pressure, they’re all stuck there and not moving [which removes some confounding factors].”

To recover from disaster, crisis or trauma, “fun’s not enough”, says Peter. Watching a comedy movie is not a substitute for arts therapy – which, like any therapy, is sometimes uncomfortable. Ying has worked with low income women scared to make a mark on expensive paper – they do not think they are worth those resources. Ying encourages them to overcome their concerns and increase their self worth using the paper.

Some people have trouble letting go of their fear of making a mistake: the unpredictability of watercolours can enable them to take risks in a safe space and “see beauty can come from an accident, from leaving space for surprise”, says Ying. Self-reflection and emotional regulation can come from this embodied learning.

And for all of us at home, Peter says, evoking Wordsworth: “There’s more to life than ‘getting and spending’, you know. A truly rich life is one that is imbued with the joy and the wonder of making.”

Consider also the tikanga Ngarino describes learning from her artist mother, Elizabeth Ellis (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou; 2025 senior New Zealander of the Year): when you start a new practice, “the first thing that you make, you have to give away. And then the second one you can keep ... When you receive someone’s first example, it’s usually a bit wonky, the colours are a bit off – but they’ve chosen you to make that connection with, and that’s really important.”

Ngarino explains that the definitions of art change over time but “art has this really important role within te ao Māori, from my perspective: it is about connection and a sense of belonging, feeling part of a community, whatever that might look like. That’s an important component of well-being.”

Ying would agree; her kawakawa print work – her reminder of belonging – hangs directly over her desk.