The
Arts, and activities such as painting and dancing, could
potentially help address society’s pleasure-seeking obsessions
and lead us to better and more healthy choice behaviour,
according to a new City, University of London review.
The
paper, which is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society
B, suggests that while The Arts are often thought to be
little more than worthwhile activities, recent evidence suggests
that they can stimulate broad neural networks, potentially
counteracting the detrimental effects of activities that only
give us a ‘pleasure kick’.
Dr.
Julia F. Christensen, from the Cognitive Neuroscience Research
Unit in Department of Psychology at City, University of London
and author of the paper, said:
“Today’s society is pleasure seeking. We expect to obtain
pleasurable experiences fast and easily. We are used to
hyper-palatable foods and drinks, and we can get pornography,
games and gadgets whenever we want them. The problem is that
with this type of pleasure-maximising choice behaviour we may be
turning ourselves into mindless pleasure junkies, handing over
our free will for the next dopamine shoot as we prioritise
activities, which like junk food, are deprived of any deeper
meaning and nutritional value. But recent evidence suggests that
The Arts can help counter this.”
Increasingly research is showing that in excess such
‘pleasure-only’ activities might have negative effects on our
health as they provoke a change in the neural mechanisms
underlying the choices we make in our life. The
evidence shows that drug addictions
and behavioural addictions rely on the same neural networks, as
a result ‘pleasure-only’ activities effectively make us
‘pleasure-junkies’.
In this way many of today’s easy pleasures have the potential to
create behavioural addictions. Activities that might cause
behavioural addictions include smart phone social media app use
(we are glued to the notification icon and ‘did I receive
another like?’), gambling (‘I’ll win at the next game for
sure!’), sports, pornography, hyper-palatable foods, gaming
and the Internet.
This
can lead to choice behaviour becoming biased towards short-term
pleasure-maximizing goals. Seeking pleasure ‘here and now’,
is a common feature of the addicted brain. Our decision-making
shifts away from long-term prosperity and general well-being
maximizing objectives, which is controlled by different set of
systems in the brain.
In the
healthy brain two basic systems interact in relation to reward
and decision-making. The ‘A-system’ is concerned with maximizing
immediate reward, while the ‘I-system’ is concerned with
maximizing future reward and prosperity. The A-system wants
pleasure immediately, while the I-system relates any stimuli to
previous experience and value to foster optimal choices, ‘all
things considered’. This may include down-regulation of the
A-system, to defer immediate gratification to enable long-term
reward.
It has been suggested that The Arts can help overwrite the
detrimental effects of dysfunctional urges and craving which we
experience when we engage with empty pleasure-only activities
for too long. The arts focus our mind into one coherent state
which activates the A- and I-systems alike.
In this
way, the Arts might strengthen the
links between the A- and the I-systems – which go via a neural
structure called the insula. Strong links aid the maintenance of
healthy bodily systems by maximising our choices so they ensure
long-term prosperity. The evidence also suggests that engagement
with The Arts might decrease the probability of developing
behavioural addictions in the first place. Importantly,
engagement with the arts demonstrably has the potential to
engage both the A- and the I-systems in lay people and experts
alike.
As a result we experience activities such as painting or dancing
both as pleasurable and rewarding (via the A-system), but also
as meaningful because they engage our previous personal memories
and life experience, and our sense of self (I-system). The ‘arty
experience’ is therefore not only fun, but actually good for our
life in general.
Dr. Christensen said: “While there is more research to be done,
what we’ve seen is that there is promising work showing the
benefits of The Arts when it comes to countering the
all-pervasive pleasure-seeking behaviours currently seen in
society, many of which can have negative impacts on our lives.
The best recommendation is to plan periods without the
activities which have the potential to cause behavioural
addictions. Our brain is not going to help us resist the
temptation of the moment, so it’s better to plan in advance.
Also, by involving ourselves more in The Arts, we can
potentially counter some of the negative effects and engage our
brains more broadly to live truly fulfilling and meaningful
lives.”
www.city.ac.uk