A recent study done by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has shown the affect

of a variety of art on the brain, and how it affects it in a positive way. "Art accesses some of the most advanced processes of human intuitive analysis and expressivity and a key form of aesthetic appreciation is through embodied cognition, the ability to pro ect oneself as an agent in the depicted scene," says !hristopher "yler, director of the Smith#$ettlewell %rain &maging !enter. Artists are known to be better observers and exhibit better memory than non#artists. &n an effort to see what happens in the brain when an individual is drawing and whether drawing can increase the brain's plasticity, (r. )ora )ikova, a scientist at Smith#$ettlewell, developed a way to capture an individual's drawing during an f*+& scan so that she could study it in congenitally blind individuals. Sub ects explored raised#line tactile images with their fingers and spent a week learning to draw from memory alone, "yler explained. ,hile congenitally blind people usually don't have activation in the visual area of the brain, in brain scans done after the sub ects were taught to draw from memory, )ikova found that the training procedure produced dramatic enhancement of the activation, -very specific to the primary visual cortex or what would have been the primary visual cortex in these congenitally blind sub ects," "yler said. ""hat's a remarkable form of rapid neural plasticity induced by this uni.ue training procedure." /ina $raus, the 0ugh $nowles 1rofessor of !ommunication Sciences, /eurobiology 2 1hysiology, and 3tolaryngology at /orthwestern 4niversity as well as the principal investigator at the Auditory /euroscience )aboratory, found that playing music also affects the brain. ",e have found, and others have found, that musicians have stronger auditory and listening cognitive skills across the lifespan," she says. 0earing speech in noise is one area in which musicians are uni.uely skilled. &n standardi5ed tests, musicians across the lifespan were much better than the general public at listening to sentences and repeating them back as the level of background noise increased. "&nterestingly, even if you are an older musician and you had hearing loss, your ability to hear in noise is still better than an older person's ability to hear in noise if they have normal hearing," $raus said. ",e are also seeing that after two years of training 6 one year was not enough 6 the brains of the children who are in music have changed so that they are now less impacted by noise. %iologically, their nervous systems have become more efficient machines and this has positive conse.uences for both reading skills and hearing in noise." *usicians are also known for their ability to keep rhythm, a skill that is correlated with reading ability and how precisely the brain responds to sound. After one year, students who participated in the group music instruction were faster and more accurate at keeping a beat than students in the control group, $raus said. ""o sum things up, we are what we do and our past shapes our present," $raus said. "Auditory biology is not fro5en in time. &t's a moving target. And music education really does seem to enhance communication by strengthening language skills."

",hen you're doing art, your brain is running full speed," 7ikan said. "&t's hitting on all eight cylinders. So if you can figure out what's happening to the brain on art, you know a whole lot more about the brain."