How Making Art and Learning ART (Attention Restoration Theory) Helps Our Brains

 How Making Art and Learning ART (Attention Restoration Theory) Helps Our Brains

Brief exposures to nature can cause changes in our working memories and attention performances. Environmental neuroscience researches how interactions with the environment develop and integrate data within larger and smaller scale areas such as cognition, neurobiology, and environmental social work. This type of research helps us understand how we can connect our behaviors, attention, and brain functions to what surrounds us. Natural environments tend to have softly fascinating stimuli. It is theorized that the capture of involuntary attention should be soft and not all-consuming. For example,  walking near a waterfall would have a different effect on our brains and their various functions as opposed to walking in the busy streets of Chicago.

When I feel nervous or anxious, I like to take a walk outside or sometimes paint. When I am listening to lectures and taking notes, I tend to always find myself doodling on the sides of my notebook.  When I need a break, I listen to music or play music myself. Perhaps, making art can relate to the research and findings of what environmental neuroscience suggests. Art can be a form of soft fascinating stimuli. 

The studies of Marc Berman and his team in their article “Environmental Neuroscience” written for the American Psychological Association, introduce the origins, approaches, and methods that have been and continue to be studied in the field of environmental neuroscience. Interestingly, the Attention Restoration Theory or ART distinguishes the difference between voluntary and directed attention and how our brain consumes these different mechanisms. Directed attention is finite and can be depleted, however, it is important how we activate our infinite involuntary attention. Nature is not the only environment that does this. Music and art just happen to have these properties as well.

Learning about ART and making art is important because humans are limited-capacity information processors. Simulations of such lead to cognitive improvements. Studies for the  Journal of the American Art Therapy Association have shown that making art can lower stress and anxiety because it can activate the reward center of our brain, and lets us focus deeply.  Making art is indeed a form of soft stimulus, and this is very similar to what the findings of Marc Berman and his team have learned from ART.

Berman, Marc G., et al. “Environmental Neuroscience.” The American Psychologist, vol. 74, no. 9, 2019, pp. 1039–52, https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000583.

Gharib, M. (2020, January 11). Feeling artsy? here's how making art helps your brain. NPR. Retrieved October 14, 2022, from https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/01/11/795010044/feeling-artsy-heres-how-making-art-helps-your-brain