Dr. Daisy Fancourt
speaker
445 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 3 Aug
Dr. Daisy Fancourt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It is what kids do all the time.
They're always...
Singing, dancing, doodling, crafting, making up plays.
They're brilliant at it, but we lose it as adults, even though it remains just as fundamental to us and to our health.
This is really why I wrote the book, because when I tell friends and family about the research that I do, people are often amazed that there is this proper science underpinning it.
I think people think, well, yeah, I know I might feel happier, maybe I feel more relaxed, but they're often surprised when you say there are actually over 30,000 published scientific papers now.
on the health and well-being benefits of arts engagements.
And these include sort of rigorous, randomised trials that have compared arts to other things that we're much more used to talking about, like psychological therapies or exercise or other kinds of behaviours in our lives.
But we still haven't had the public awareness around this, and it's felt like it's this bizarrely well-kept secret, which doesn't even feel ethical because it's such a simple thing for us all to do in our lives, so it's something we should all know about.
So if you're going to a museum and you're looking at that piece of art in front of you, immediately you are having an emotional response to that artwork and a cognitive response to that artwork.
It takes us fractions of a second to initially appraise a picture like that and to form that basic emotional response.
But actually, as we're looking at it, what we tend to find is that we will focus our attention really closely onto it.
And this is really key because actually art is very good at capturing that attention.
And if we can give it that attention so we can actually hold that focus for a while, it actually helps to block out things in our lives.
It can be something that becomes a sort of mindful moment.
in directing that attention.
One thing people often say is when they engage in the arts, they can get into that state of flow where you might lose track of time.
You'll be looking at that painting and suddenly realize that you've been stood there for a couple of minutes without realizing, or you'll be crafting or you'll be making music or doing something else, arts engaged.
And when we have that moment of flow, that's actually because we're having a synchronization between our attentional networks in our brain and the reward networks in our brain.
And this is why it can feel so absorbing when we do art.
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