During the Sedona Arts Center’s Feb. 1 unveiling of its latest report on the economic benefit of the arts to Sedona, SAC CEO Julie Richard and Americans for the Arts Vice President Randy Cohen also addressed the non-economic benefits of arts and culture to human societies and the damage done to human societies by the COVID-19 pandemic response.

Richard said she had recently attended a virtual National Endowment for the Arts summit at which Surgeon General Vivek Murthy had spoken.

“He talked about needing to rebuild the arts and culture infrastructure post-pandemic, and that the sector has not rebounded, which is impacting more than just the arts organizations themselves,” Richard said. “He talked about the rise in instances of social isolation and loneliness, and the fact that those issues have mortality rates similar to smoking and obesity … He said that arts interest would combat all of these issues. The arts bring joy, and joy is good for our health and wellbeing. Concluding with how the arts are essential to a healthy life, and why investment by our government entities just makes healthy sense … Not only are the arts organizations here in Sedona an important economic driver, but we’re also essential for health and wellbeing, and therefore it’s critical that greater investment be made to ensure longevity.”

“When I worked with Scripps, every Tuesday at three o’clock, we used to have live chamber music in the lobby,” said Cohen, who was previously a medical researcher at the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, Calif. “It was wonderful. Four musicians just transformed the space.

“What we all started to notice was that patients we’d see in their rooms clinically, lethargic, depressed … in the presence of the music, you can see physical transformation. People’s eyes got less cloudy. Their posture got better … it was like getting an IV drip of the arts.”

“There’s a lot of research that talks about the benefits of arts to mental health,” Cohen continued. “The research is so powerfully clear that a student with an education rich in the arts is performing better academically. Better grades, better standardized test scores, lower dropout rates, and those are findings that cut across all socioeconomic strata.”

He offered a 10-point list of reasons that the arts “are fundamental to our humanity,” including unifying communities and improving understanding of other cultures, fostering empathy, sparking creativity and innovation across fields, improving child welfare, reducing poverty and improving physical and mental health.

“An investment in artists, creative workers, and arts organizations is vital to the nation’s post-pandemic recovery,” Cohen said.

‘Collateral Damage’

“You are all here today after coming through a couple years that has been the hardest on the arts in history in this country,” Cohen said, observing that 99% of all arts organizations had to cancel performances or shut down during pandemic response. “Arts organizations lost jobs at five times the rate of all nonprofits.”

“If you’re a public health person and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is,” Dr. Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health at the time of the pandemic outbreak, said in a recent interview. “That is something that will save a life; it doesn’t matter what else happens. So you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recover from. So, yeah, collateral damage … It’s another mistake we made.”

Arts and Biochemistry

The primary response measure to the COVID-19 pandemic was social isolation, which reduces the activity of the human body’s serotonin, oxytocin, dopamine and endorphin systems. Declines in levels of these neurochemicals produce cognitive and creative impairment as well as psychiatric disorders. [Charnay and Leger 2010; Merens et al 2008; Ferreri et al 2019; Rice and Derish 2015; Tyagi 2020]

Conversely, elevated serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin and endorphin levels enhance creativity, memory, cognition and musical and artistic perception. Participation in artistic activities likewise elevates levels of these neurochemicals. [Jeong et al 2005; Winkelman 2021; Mavridis 2015; Salimpoor et al 2011; Jola and Calmeiro 2017; Ivanova et al 2018; Dunbar 2012; Dunbar 2016]

“Positive mental health can be construed as the individual experiencing a preponderance [of] neurochemicals associated with positive affect [e.g., dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin and oxytocin] relating to neurochemicals associated with negative affect,” psychologist M. Joseph Sirgy wrote in the July 2019 edition of Quality of Life Research. These neurochemicals are similarly associated with egalitarian and anti-authoritarian behaviors.

Arts as Old as Human Origins

“Arts and culture is part of our history, our heritage,” Cohen said. The earliest known visual art, in southern Africa, dates to approximately 71,000 years ago, likely predating the development of language, which paleoanthropologist Richard Klein placed at between 50,000 and 40,000 years ago.

“The human signature of elevated striatal dopamine, serotonin, and neuropeptide Y, coupled with lowered acetylcholine, systematically favors externally driven behavior and greatly amplifies sensitivity to social cues that promote social conformity, empathy, and altruism,” anthropologist Mary Ann Raghanti wrote in a 2018 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “These eventually facilitated the acquisition of language by elevating the reproductive advantage afforded those most sensitive to social cues.”

Communal artistic practices among early humans favored the production of elevated levels of neurotransmitters that could facilitate the development of prosocial behavior and language. Anthropologists have identified dance as the most significant of these practices, with Barbara Ehrenreich describing it as a “biotechnology” for binding groups together. Biological anthropologist Robin Dunbar found that participating in singing, dancing and drumming produced improved mood and elevated endorphin levels to a much greater extent than merely listening to or observing a performance did.

Engagement with the arts, in short, is physically linked not just to mental health but to the ability to have social interactions and build societies in the first place.

“The arts aren’t nice but necessary,” Cohen said. “There was a farmer in Wisconsin who paid somebody $60 to milk his cows so he could go to the theatre that night. People are doing what it takes to get to the arts.”