Art, Culture and Creativity for Brain Health

I've come to believe that arts and creativity are a genuine prescription for improving brain health — both for people living with dementia and for those at risk of developing it. Here's why.

Engagement in the arts offers something rare in this field: a pathway to hope. Creative practice can be for everyone, including people with dementia, and there's growing evidence that it reduces anxiety and improves wellbeing. It's also a great leveller. Arts and creativity promote equity and inclusion in a way few other interventions do — there doesn't need to be an external goal or a measurable purpose for the activity to have meaning. The emphasis shifts to being, and to what a person can do, rather than what they've lost. That shift alone can change the narrative around dementia, from incapacity to capacity, and bring a sense of playfulness and joy into healthcare and care home environments that badly need it — improving quality of life for people with dementia and for the staff and family who care for them.

What we're prescribing. The evidence base is strongest, and growing, around music: listening to it, playing an instrument, singing. Engaging with visual art helps people process emotion and improve wellbeing. Dance has been shown to improve mood and quality of life for people with dementia. And other creative pursuits — theatre, poetry, writing — are showing similar benefit, often through co-creative processes that involve people with dementia directly in making the work, not just receiving it.

Where the field falls short. The challenge in using this prescription well is that the evidence base itself needs strengthening. Research methodology in this space is often weak, and there are real silos between clinicians, social care practitioners, and the artists and creatives doing this work on the ground. Bridging that gap means more leaders in this space, breaking down the professional silos so disciplines work together, building out the effectiveness evidence, and taking Public and Patient Involvement (PPI) seriously — involving people with dementia in shaping the research, not just studying them.

GBHI's theory of change. This is where the Global Brain Health Institute has been making some noise. We believe that changing dementia's tragedy narrative takes arts, science, and genuine co-creative collaboration with people with dementia, together. Between a fifth and a third of our fellows come from arts, humanities, or creative backgrounds. They train alongside scientists and doctors — learning how science can inform their creative practice, and helping shape how scientists and clinicians approach people with dementia and their caregivers. Many have gone on to receive pilot funding from GBHI, the Alzheimer's Association, and Alzheimer's Society UK to run arts and creative interventions for people with dementia. That's how the evidence base grows — to the point where social prescribing of arts and creativity for brain health becomes part of national policy, everywhere.

Four ways the work shows up

Dominic Campbell, one of our senior Atlantic Fellows and a cultural producer who leads Creative Brain Week, has a useful way of clustering what happens when you stand back and look at what our fellows are actually doing. It falls into four groups:

Engage — arts, creativity and connection. Gráinne Hope's work builds a quality framework for music performance and participation in nursing homes and hospitals — cultural engagement in music to improve wellbeing and brain health, delivered by musicians trained to work in a clinical setting. Magda Kaczmarska's dance programmes for people living with dementia, developed through her organisation DanceStream Projects, use co-creative movement to support brain health in older adults. And Karen Meenan's Making Hay is an intergenerational, dementia-inclusive theatre company that co-creates plays with people with dementia and their carers through reminiscence — three productions so far, performed for dementia-inclusive audiences.

Understand — arts, creativity and meaning. Dana Walrath's graphic memoir Aliceheimer's chronicles her mother's experience of dementia — finding the right words to understand the brain science of neurodegeneration while opening up new ways to care for, understand, and rebuild a relationship with someone living with the condition.

Transform — arts, creativity and equity. Kunle Adewale, founder of the Arts in Medicine Fellowship in Nigeria, trains artists and non-artists together to work with people facing brain health challenges through arts practice — bringing dignity and connection to elderly people and people with dementia who are too often neglected or stigmatised.

Advocate — arts, creativity and awareness. Eléonore Bayen created MyBrainRobbie, a children's education initiative — now translated into seven languages — that teaches children and teenagers about brain health through storytelling. And Josh Kornbluth, a monologist and comedian, created the Citizen Brain video series with UCSF's Dr Bruce Miller, using comedy to make brain science and dementia awareness accessible to a much wider audience than a lecture hall ever could.

Taken together, this is the case for arts and creativity as more than a nice-to-have: it's a way to build brain health, and to turn the fear and stigma of dementia inside out.

About The Global Brain Health Institute (GBHI): GBHI was founded in 2015 through funding from Atlantic Philanthropies, with founding sites at the University of California, San Francisco, and Trinity College Dublin — a transdisciplinary leadership training programme focused on brain health and dementia prevention, built around a lifelong fellowship.

Museums Can Improve Your Brain Health

Museums and galleries are special places where individuals and communities can come together for connection, well-being, and sense-making. Art in all its forms can stimulate the imagination, provoke curiosity, and generate emotions that can have a healing effect on both the body and the brain. And there is increasing evidence that visiting cultural spaces can reduce anxiety, lift depression, decrease loneliness, and potentially slow cognitive decline and lower the risk of developing dementia.