On Friday nights, neuroscientist Susan Magsamen pushes the coffee table aside and dances in her living room with her husband. They are, by her own admission, not great dancers. They do it anyway because it makes them feel more alive.
Her research helps explain why. As co‑author of Your Brain on Art and director of the International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins, she has spent years studying what happens when we sing, draw, move, or listen. Older adults who engage in the arts even a few times a year have a lower risk of dying over the next decade than those who don’t. Twenty to forty‑five minutes of creative activity can lower cortisol, our main stress hormone, and support better mental health and quality of life.
This isn’t just “art is nice to have.” It’s evidence that creative engagement helps keep us alive and well.
Art Is Like Oxygen
Imagine trying to stay healthy without sleep. You might manage for a while, but systems would start to fail. The emerging science says creativity works the same way.
When you sing, you stimulate the vagus nerve and switch on your body’s calming response. When you work with clay, you release serotonin and focus more easily. When you listen to music tied to strong memories, multiple brain regions involved in emotion and recall light up, sometimes enough that a person with Alzheimer’s can recognize someone they love. When people regularly make or experience art, their stress biology, mood, cognition, and even long‑term survival odds shift.
Art behaves less like a luxury and more like oxygen. You can’t see it moving through your system, but it’s feeding something vital. Remove it, and everything else has to work harder just to cope.
Creativity Belongs to Everyone
If creativity is that fundamental, then access can’t be reserved for the few who are labeled “talented.” It has to be something everyone can touch. That’s the core of COMPAS’s mission: to put creativity in the hands of all Minnesotans, regardless of age, ability, or circumstances.
A COMPAS workshop, for example, is a structured opportunity for students to write, draw, move, drum, act, and imagine in ways that research indicates support brain development, emotional regulation, and connection. A painting workshop in an older adult community, a storytelling session in a shelter, a mural on a city wall, these are ways of getting more of that creative “oxygen” into places that are often running on fumes.
What You Can Do Right Now
You don’t have to be a professional or even “good” at it. The studies don’t reward talent; they reward engagement.
So give your brain what it’s clearly built for. Put on one song and really listen. Sing in the car. Draw or color for twenty minutes. Join the COMPAS program that comes to your library, community center, or park, even if you feel rusty or unsure.
Or stand up for the arts when budgets are on the line, when a program is about to be cut, when a bond or levy needs support, because funding, visibility, and real access for every community are how this “oxygen” reaches all Minnesotans. And if you want to put creativity directly into people’s hands, bring a COMPAS Teaching Artist into your school, organization, business, or anyplace else that could use more imagination and connection, which is just about everywhere.
If the science is right, this isn’t a nice extra. It’s part of how we survive, and how we stay fully, vividly alive.
Learn more about COMPAS, our roster of teaching artists, and how we can bring creativity to your environment here.
Read more stories about our work to put creativity in the hands of millions of Minnesotans here.
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