Can Creativity Beat Cognitive Decline?


4 minute read

When my Dad was in a nursing home, I would often do crosswords with him. He had always enjoyed The Irish Times crossword (Crosaire not Simplex!) but he didn’t bother much with newspapers in the last year of his life, so my sister bought him one of those compendium puzzle books instead. His physical health was fragile, but mentally he remained robust until the end. I imagine 70-odd years of voracious reading and word teasers had fortified his brain health long after his heart, lungs and kidneys had begun to give up.

I’ve never been one for brain teasers or word puzzles, bar a few games of Scrabble during lockdown with my sister, so it was a relief to read an article explaining that creativity can help brain-specific health (as opposed to mental health) as much as problem-solving.

If you’re an individual who loves to paint, play music, craft or dance, and who wants to protect against cognitive decline, you won’t have to swap sewing needles for Sudoku to do so. 

This week was Creative Brain Week at Trinity College, a five-day event during which artists, scientists and innovators explore how brain science and creativity collide. The website describes creativity as “a critical skill for the coming century” because of its importance to everything from social development and entrepreneurship to physical, mental and brain health. The latter caught my interest in particular, firstly because I’ve read, and written about, how the arts can nurture good mental health, but I didn’t fully realise how vital creativity is to preventing cognitive decline as we move into later life. 

According to a study in the journal, Neurology, in 2017, people who engaged in artistic activities, such as painting, drawing and sculpting, in both middle age and old age, were 73% less likely to have memory and thinking problems, such as mild cognitive impairment, which can lead to alzheimers. The study also found that individuals who enjoy craft-based activities, such as sewing, woodwork and ceramics, were 45% less likely to encounter cognitive issues. On a purely anecdotal level, I’ve seen an enormous difference in my own mother’s capacity to engage mentally since restrictions were lifted and she returned to her daily activities in the local parish hall, which include a weekly morning of crafting. 

A more recent study published in BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) last year concurred that creative expression (including storytelling, visual arts, dance, music and dramatic arts) can potentially mitigate cognitive decline in older people. Engaging our brains in this way could not only protect neurons from dying, but stimulate the growth of new ones. In Ireland there are currently 64,000 people living with dementia, a figure which is predicted to more than double in the next 25 years, according to The Alzheimer Society of Ireland. That additional 50% is likely to include some of us midlifers (one in ten people diagnosed is under 65, sadly). My late uncle was one of them. A bookish, well-read man, his rapid cognitive decline in his fifties seemed utterly incongruous.

When writing about creativity and mental health in a previous article for Heyday, I mentioned that creativity should be taught in schools not only as an end in and of itself, but as a way for children and teenagers to manage their mood. Surely, it should be promoted as a method of strengthening brain health too?

As a school goer, I always had the impression that maths and physics were the mental equivalent of strengthening exercises in a gym, while the arts were more akin to a gentle, relaxing swim. But this isn’t the case.

A professor at Columbia University in New York told The Healing Power of Art & Artists, an American website focused on raising awareness of how art serves as a positive catalyst for change in the world, that subjects such as mathematics, science and languages require complex cognitive and creative capacities that are also “typical of arts learning”.

And according to Better Aging, a website devoted to treatments and studies that could help to prevent cognitive decline, creativity challenges our brains, forcing it to use fresh communication channels called dendrites. Studies also suggest, the site explains, that artists have more grey matter in the parietal lobe, the part of the brain responsible for receiving and correlating sensory information. So shouldn’t art, music and drama be promoted not as ‘soft’ or niche subject options but as necessary brain-training activities nurtured in school and encouraged through young adulthood and into midlife? There’s a strong argument, too, that every child should be required to take a creative subject, the way they are obliged to study maths and English, although in the feverish points race that the Leaving Cert has become, this would probably have to be in a non-exam capacity.

I lament all the artistic skills which I honed as a child and teenager but cast aside as naturally as my school uniform once I began university: crochet, calligraphy, life drawing. I picked up knitting again a few years ago, but now I plan to approach it as my Dad did his crossword and make it a natural part of each day. But making and doing isn’t the only way to bring creativity back into your life and care for your brain health. Just looking at art stimulates the brain and puts our innate ability for organising patterns and making sense of shapes to use. Before lockdown, my sister and I had a weekly routine called culture Sunday, which I wrote about here a couple of years ago. Now, six weeks after lockdown has been lifted, it’s time I got back out and continued to explore the museums and galleries around the city. How wonderful to think that such a lovely way to spend time is actually flexing our cognitive muscles too? When I think of all those painful hours spent on algebra…

Marie Kelly, March 2022

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