The “Blooming” Field of Neuroarts

Despite major federal funding cuts, researchers are dedicated to determining how engaging in the arts can improve our brain health.

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Last October, in a darkened presentation hall, nearly 6,000 neuroscientists hummed, snapped, and sang as improvisational singer Davin Youngs and his colleagues led them to create harmony from the initial cacophony. This musical interlude highlighted the power of the arts to alter our brains and behavior.

For Young’s group, leading the musical improvisation activated their parasympathetic nervous systems, flooding their nervous systems with neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin. They turned off the judgmental parts of their brains in the prefrontal cortex and turned on mechanisms that enabled them to go into a flow state.

“So, what was happening to you?” Susan Magsamen asked her audience during the Dialogues Between Neuroscience and Society lecture at Neuroscience 2024 in Chicago, IL. “Well, sound vibrations reached you in just 3 milliseconds, and your brains were also flooded with neurotransmitters. But at the same time that that was happening, you were also feeling probably a little more relaxed as cortisol levels began to lower and you were entraining to the beat of the music, activating both alpha and beta waves.”

“But when you think about what was happening for all of us together, our neurons started to fire together, and we started to correlate to the rhythms and beats of the music, and we synchronized with each other,” she added. “And if by some chance you felt a little awe-inspired, you're now more open and empathetic and connected to each other, which I think can only be a really wonderful thing.”

As founder and executive director of the International Arts + Mind Lab (IAM Lab) at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Magsamen’s efforts are at the forefront of a new field that studies how the arts and aesthetic experiences measurably change our brains, bodies, and behaviors.

“It’s an extremely exciting time where science and the arts are coming together to prove that we are wired for the arts,” Magsamen says.

For decades, research has shown artistic endeavors including music, painting, writing, crafting and others can provide therapeutic benefits for people experiencing PTSD, depression, or anxiety. What’s been missing is a framework to ensure cohesive, rigorous evidence underpins the field of neuroaesthetics.

Susan Magsamen, founder and executive director of the International Arts + Mind Lab (IAM Lab) at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, delivers remarks during the Dialogues Between Neuroscience and Society lecture, October 5, 2024, at Neuroscience 2024 in Chicago, IL.

Society for Neuroscience, 2024

The field of neuroaesthetics comprises researchers from disparate disciplines with different experimental approaches and dissimilar reporting standards. In an effort to effectively translate neuroaesthetic findings into clinical prevention, healthcare, or wellness practices, Magsamen and her IAM Lab launched the NeuroArts Blueprint Initiative in 2019 in collaboration with the Aspen Institute's Health, Medicine & Society Program. The initiative, which Magsamen co-directs with Aspen Institute vice president Ruth Katz, is creating a community, resources, and a space for shared knowledge among researchers, clinicians, and artists.

“It is the North Star to make arts in all of its forms, part of mainstream medicine, public health, and society," says Magsamen of the initiative. The project is designed similarly to a business-to-business model to serve the field by removing silos and integrating neuroaesthetic researchers across sectors, including the arts, technology, academia, and industry.

Magsamen credits her “maker” family with her interest in the arts. But it was her twin sister, Sandra, nearly losing her leg in a farming accident when the girls were 12 that emphasized to Magsamen the healing nature of creative expression. For a year, Sandra was house bound, “stuck inside herself,” and unable to process her trauma, Magsamen said.

Their mother encouraged Sandra to draw. The sketches gave her family insight into the emotions she was experiencing but unable to express, inspiring Magsamen’s early academic work in therapeutic recreation and the arts and driving her ambition to bridge arts and neuroscience today.

The NeuroArts Blueprint Initiative houses a resource center that includes a library of the latest publications in neuroaesthetic research, a directory of scientists, clinicians, and other professionals in the neuroarts field, as well as a continually updated list of funding opportunities. In addition, the initiative administers the Renée Fleming Investigator Award, supporting early-career investigators who are conducting basic research and practical research in the neuroarts. Established by the Renée Fleming Foundation, the award is now in its second year and has funded nine teams.

Daniel Liu Bowling, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, and his co-investigator Sarah Fogler, a board-certified music therapist and licensed creative arts therapist at the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function in Mount Vernon, New York, represent one team of the 2025 awardees. Together, they are studying self-guided, music-based interventions for depression and anxiety among people aged 18 through 29.

"Young people who are so engaged with music use it to modulate, [but] sometimes not positively," says Bowling. "There's a real opportunity to improve treatments for them, because they also tend not to respond or to not adhere to treatment or be treatment avoidant."

Bowling and Fogler are blending neuroscience and music therapy concepts to assess personalized treatments in young people with moderate to severe depression and anxiety. The work will ultimately contribute to the development of accessible and customized music therapy in mental health care.

"We’re essentially looking for evidence that you can combine what we know about music biologically with what we know about music therapeutically," says Bowling. "If we're successful, it will be an important step towards a new kind of intervention with more natural appeal for today’s youth, ultimately helping to offset their increasing struggles with depression and anxiety."

Proving projects like Bowling and Folger's are effective requires consistency in the methods of experimentation and the means of producing the findings across the neuroarts space. This is a known issue. A 2011 review paper published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience by Anjan Chatterjee, professor of Neurology, Psychology, and Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, addressed the challenges of the up-and-coming discipline.

"In knowing that the pleasure of viewing a beautiful painting is correlated with activity within orbito-frontal cortex or the nucleus accumbens adds biologic texture to our understanding of the rewards of aesthetic experiences," wrote Chatterjee. "However, it is not obvious that it, by itself, advances our understanding of the psychological nature of that reward."

The NeuroArts BluePrint Initiative intends to solve this decade-old problem. "... To be able to be recognized and to be able to attract not only funders, but payers and insurance [providers] to cover some of those services [art therapies], the science needs to be rigorous," says Emmeline Edwards, the former director of the Division of Extramural Research of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) at NIH. Edwards supports the NeuroArts Blueprint Initiative and works with Magsamen to set the project's agenda.

Before her recent retirement after 27 years of federal service, Edwards launched the Music-Based Intervention Toolkit in 2023. The toolkit establishes reporting guidelines and recommendations on what to include in music-based intervention procedures to enhance consistency and reproducibility.

As a result of NIH funding, music is the most established area of study in neuroaesthetics. For example, in 2019, the NIH awarded $20 million over five years to support the first research projects in music therapy and neuroscience under a program called the Sound Health Initiative, a collaboration between the NIH and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) also contributed funds. 

Creator of VOXUS, an improvisational singing experience, Davin Youngs (center) and improvisational group warm up the crowd during the Dialogues Between Neuroscience and Society lecture October 5, 2024, at Neuroscience 2024 in Chicago, IL.

Society for Neuroscience, 2024

However, executive orders issued in the first quarter of 2025 slashed NIH funds, slowing neuroarts' momentum. Today, NIH web pages for the Sound Health Initiative are no longer in service, and events like the 2025 Annual Music Research Networks Investigator Meeting, centered on sharing advances across NIH-funded music-based research networks, were postponed indefinitely in February. 

Still, the early nod from NIH legitimized neuroaesthetics as a pillar in medical research, despite the ebb and flow of federal funding. Magsamen and Edwards both expressed that neuroart will likely turn toward philanthropy, as foundations have been supportive in the past and have signaled future support.

One thing is certain: Humans are going to create. "Flowers are blooming" in this field, Magsamen says. "Now the need is so great from the community that we are coming together, and I think we are more resolved and are more committed to the role of the arts and health and well-being today. You can cut institutions down, but you can't cut people out.”

About the Author

Juliet M. Beverly

Juliet M. Beverly is the senior editor for BrainFacts. She previously worked at the Embassy of Austria in the Office of Science & Technology as the assistant editor for Bridges, an online magazine covering transatlantic science and technology policy.