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
In fact, there was a great study in the US that looked at over 200 different activities that people do and found that the one that induces that state of flow the most is arts and crafts.
So it really, really helps us to be in that moment.
But it also then gives you this emotional response.
So when you're looking, the emotion that people report the most when they look at art or engage in art is happiness.
And that's because when we engage, we're actually activating reward networks in the brain, which
that are really ancient networks that give us these pleasure responses.
In particular, we activate the dopaminergic system that leads to the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine that makes us feel happy.
And of course, lots of things do that in life, but the arts are particularly good at it because we get that dopamine release, not only in kind of joyful moments, like when we see a really...
beautiful happy picture or when we're listening to a song and you get that chorus coming back that you were expecting but we also get it in anticipation of those moments so it's that build-up that expectation of that chorus coming back or the expectation of the happy ending in a book or it's
When you're actually thinking you're about to spot something new in that picture.
And it's because the arts give us those constant moments of expectation and resolution, like tension and release.
They're constantly giving us repeated doses of dopamine.
So they're particularly good at making us feel happy.
Don't worry, there are lots of beneficial neurochemicals from art as well as dopamine.
We really do see the benefits for anxiety, particularly from kind of relaxing arts experiences, whether that's looking at a painting or whether it's listening to relaxing music, reading books, for example, or doing those sort of mindful tactile crafts or textile activities.
One of the ways that we can really track this is looking at our hormones, like our stress hormones, like cortisol, and also, which is a sign of our endocrine system, our hormone system being down-regulated.
And we can also see it by looking at heart rate and blood pressure, which is a sign of our autonomic nervous system being relaxed.
And actually the studies, lots and lots of studies have now shown that even just a few minutes of engaging with art can lead to those reductions in autonomic nervous system activity and in stress hormones.
What's really interesting as well is some studies have actually directly compared arts with taking medication.
So this has mainly been done looking at kind of pre-surgical settings and saying lots of studies have happened in hospitals.
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