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Research from UCL suggests engaging with arts and culture improves overall health outcomes.
These days, the fountain of youth is marketed as some kind of AI-backed, biohacked offshoot of the billionaire class. Health and wellness has crept further into a digital landscape – one often shaped by far-right thinking – and traditional concepts of longevity have been replaced with elitist alternatives.
So you’d be surprised to learn that arts and culture (yes, those archaic pastimes held in cavernous gallery halls and dusty old books) are the secret to a longer, healthier life. New research by UCL suggests engaging with the arts is radically beneficial for our overall wellbeing. Who’d have thought.
Arts and culture are, in many ways, the backbone of human society. But they’re increasingly underfunded and disregarded in our capitalist system. In the UK schools, literature and art history have been axed left and right as ‘soft subjects’ – a derogatory term for ostensibly useless. If you aren’t on a path toward medicine, law or finance, many high-powered politicians and policy makers deem your efforts wasted.
This attitude has developed with the advent of AI, which throws the future of higher education institutions into question. When students can learn the basics from a computer, why would they spend thousands on university? Educators have been warned that unless schools can promise something AI can’t deliver – whether that be specialism or soul – they could (and should) cease to operate.
With such stringent pressures placed on professors and institutions, arts and culture – already deemed frivolous in the capitalist-maxxxing age we now live in – have been thrown to the wayside. Which makes UCL’s findings all the more surprising (or satisfying, depending on who you ask).
Of course, anyone in the creative industries – any lover of art – will roll their eyes and scoff at this new study. My instinctual response was: ‘well, duh. Obviously’. But having hard facts and figures is nice, too.
Researcher Prof Daisy Fancourt said that ‘people were about a year younger, biologically, if they were regularly engaged in the arts.’ The study found that painting, singing or attending arts-related events could all be linked to slower cognitive decline, and that results were ‘actually the same’ for those who regularly engaged in physical activity.
It’s a refreshing revelation amidst a flurry of wellness discourse fixated on physicality, be it the explosion of GLP-1s or the return of high-protein carnivorous diets that invite a very specific, hyper-masculine image of fitness.
AI has made knowledge feel like a-given. It’s no longer something to be valued or worked for because everything is a click away.
