When I talk with teachers around the country about arts education and cognition they all ask the same question, “What research can I show my principal to prove the benefit of arts education?” It is as if teachers seek a holy grail that will prove once and for all its significant value. Teachers want to verify art education’s impact to prevent its relegation to a merely fun or acculturating activity within schools. Their question is an important and, of course, complicated one.

The good, yet bad, news for teachers is that in this age of neuro-hype, a bloom of research exists that examines how teachers can improve their practice with guidance from neuroscience. The sheer volume and inconsistent quality of this research hinder teachers from knowing what to trust. Many well-meaning educators have grabbed ahold of ideas based on neuroscience that have been incomplete or flat out wrong. The right-brain/left-brain misnomer and Mozart Effect are two such examples.

Clearly there are areas of the brain that control certain human functions – language is basically situated in the left hemisphere while decoding the emotional intention behind language is mostly situated in the right hemisphere. And while functions might be found in one or the other hemisphere of the brain, the hemispheres always work in concert. The brain is a system.

This right brain/left brain distinction made people believe that creativity was housed only within the right hemisphere and logic within the left and that individuals were hemispheric-centric. In other words, they felt as if one was creative or logical, but never both. Of course, this is not true and worse, it further marginalized creative endeavors because creativity was not located within the logic-loving left hemisphere. In my opinion, this oversimplification set arts education back until business started talking about creative leadership a few years ago. Then, suddenly, creativity was deemed worthy.

Frances Rauscher’s inquiries into whether listening to music impacts cognitive function – the so-called “Mozart Effect - are also a victim of oversimplification and arts educators’ need to prove the impact of the arts on student development and learning. This research was bandied about for over a decade and its proponents encouraged teachers to play Mozart for at least ten minutes before math tests to boost scores. The overreach of the results of this research is impressive. Rauscher’s work was only to test impacts of certain types of music on spatial-temporal reasoning like paper-folding and cutting exercises and determining whether the orientation of the letter E changed on a computer screen. And yet, people extended this research to math abilities.

I do not believe it does arts educators any good to try to find cognition research that proves that music makes a child a better math student or that children who study theatre will have higher verbal SAT scores. There might be correlation with some of these claims, but there certainly is not causation. Trying to find causation between arts education and better academic performance within other disciplines is a bootless errand. I do not believe that it is an effective strategy for arts educators to justify our existence through the improvements the arts may or may not contribute to learning in other disciplines.

So What Do We Do?

The work of the arts complicates and extends the understanding and impact of cognition research. Inquiry into embodied cognition, cognitive linguistics and social neuroscience offer promising implications to artists and arts educators. Such research demonstrates not that the arts are the midwives to better math outcomes, but that the arts play significant roles in how we process information and develop ourselves as thinkers. In her work, cognitive psychologist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang embraces how complicated learning is and captures that complexity within her laboratory. She uses stories to demonstrate the multi-modality and distribution of learning across a large portion of the brain and, therefore how interconnected the body and the brain are in learning. Artists work through stories and the embodied abstract representation of complex thoughts. This sort of research is not news to artists. Furthermore, Immordino-Yang’s work shows what all good teachers already know - emotions matter in learning. How we feel about something has a direct relationship to our retaining and transferring that information to other domains. The arts pair emotion with content all the time and because of this, we offer insights into pedagogical practices that are uncommon in other disciplines. Non-arts teachers can learn from us about how to make material relevant and how to find the emotional center within content.

Neuroscientist, Matthew Lieberman, demonstrates how important the social dimensions of learning are. He discusses one study about two groups of participants. One group was told that they were going to be given a quiz about a list of twelve items that they must memorize. The other group was asked to take the same list of twelve items and form an opinion about the type of person who might engage in the twelve activities on the list. They were not told to memorize the list or that they were going to have a quiz. When they were given what was to them a pop-quiz, they outperformed the group just asked to memorize the list – even though they were prepared for a quiz. This shows that learning within social contexts matters deeply to how we internalize and retain information. Again, artists know this intuitively. All of our work is directed at making meaning of the human condition.

Such research supports what we do every day and illustrates why artists have always deserved a seat at the table. Artists struggle to find whatever shred of proof they can to justify their existence within schools. Research into embodied and social cognition, for example, make it abundantly clear what we have never needed to justify ourselves, but rather to simply claim the impact of what we do. Neuroscience research demonstrates that learning should look more like a studio or rehearsal hall and less like a factory-modeled classroom.

Children deserve arts education not because they will become better mathematicians or scientists. They deserve arts education because the process of art making makes children more robust, divergent, empathic and connected learners. Children deserve arts education because, as Kevin Dunbar shows, studying the arts makes children better novel idea generators. The complex, divergent, connected, generative and empathic issues of learning are housed squarely within arts education. This is what we do and we do not need to hold the hands of other disciplines to justify this crucial aspect of a child’s education. So the next time you feel the impulse to justify the arts through a new study, maybe you should justify the study because of your art.