"Playing an instrument benefits your brain"
"When you actually play an instrument, that activity becomes more like a full-body brain workout." - Dr. Anita Collins, March 2020
"When you listen to music, multiple areas of your brain become engaged and active. But when you actually play an instrument, that activity becomes more like a full-body brain workout. What’s going on? Anita Collins explains the fireworks that go off in musicians’ brains when they play, and examines some of the long-term positive effects of this mental workout."

Good action starts with good intention.
"Collective intention/action is obviously more powerful than that of an individual. If one doesn't like/resonate well with the word "prayer" or some notion of a higher, perhaps "unverifiable" force, then simply think of prayer as deep intention. A meditator might perceive deep intention as coming from a still mind undistracted by busy conflicting thoughts and emotions. An individual of a more modern rational scientific bent might think of such prayer and reflection as the intelligence that arises from powerful thought and scrutiny regarding a serious issue. Some individuals will combine streams. Others may have a notion of one deity as is common to Abrahamic tradition or an animistic appreciation of the deep power of spirit in the natural elements. Motivation - love and intention are the binding factors. The conceptual differences are not the big deal here."
- Matthew Arnold, (2019), Violinist, Melbourne, Australia

Teaching Artists and the Future of the Arts
- Nick Rabkin, 2013, Research Scientist, NORC, University of Chicago.

Excerpt: "The bottom line is that children who have more arts education do better in school and in life.
... The bright line we are told divides art from entertainment, education, individual and community development is fairly new in human history, and it diminishes the complexity and the value of the arts for everyone.
... the impulse to create, express and connect is universal, that we all are culture-makers, and that art is highly social, moral and cognitive. The arts were a strategic part of their agenda to make our democracy more robust and inclusive, powerful tools for weaving the webs of social connection that build strong communities and for facing the challenges of social and emotional development while living in poverty. They were for preserving the connections of immigrants to their traditions, and for imagining worlds better..."

How art made us as a human species:
Why do we have art? Why do we have music?
Interview with Ellen Dissanayake, Affiliate Professor of Music, University of Washington, 15 June 2013
ABC-RN The Science Show (Full transcript)

Some birds elaborately decorate their nests. Is this in any way art as we know it? Are the pleasures of art quintessentially human? Ellen Dissanayake discusses the place of the arts in human existence and what, in addition to pleasure, we get from our various cultural pursuits.

Transcript excerpt:
Presenter, Robyn Williams: Tell me, what exactly are you doing with the Pleistocene? How are you investigating it?

Ellen Dissanayake: Well, it's a somewhat complex hypothesis that at first seems to have no relationship to art at all. But I have been looking at the mother-infant interaction as it occurs today. This is why I said Darwin did not go into the nursery to mention it. But all over the world in every society that we know, adults behave with babies very differently from the way they do with anyone else. And what it boils down to – I'll make a long story short – they make their ordinary smiles, sounds, movements extraordinary.

I don't know whether you are familiar with the ecological concept of ritualisation of behaviour where an ordinary movement like plucking grass or preening the wing feathers or fanning the tail or something over evolutionary time becomes a signal that is exaggerated and elaborated and repeated and then comes to mean something else, usually having to do with aggression or courtship or mating.

So in a similar way I think that mother-infant interaction can be called the seed bed of the arts because the mother's voice becomes exaggerated in its vocal contours, in its lengthened vowels it's very slow. The mother also raises her – her eyes are wide, her eyebrows are raised, her smile is exaggerated, her head is bobbed back, she nods, all of these things in repetitive, regularised, formalised ways. And her movements also, the touches, pats, embraces and kisses and things like that are all drawn from our affiliative behaviour with other friends, with adults, but between mothers and infants they are regularised, exaggerated, repeated and elaborated. And these are operations, if you will, of ritualised behaviours in other animals.

Robyn Williams: And is this something you see as a basis of things like painting, of art, visual art, of music even?

What do people do when they 'art' or 'artify'

Ellen Dissanayake: Yes, well remember that I say what do people do when they 'art' or 'artify', and I think they do these same things that animals do in ritualised behaviours and that mothers do with infants, which I am prepared to call ritualised behaviour since it occurs universally around the world. They formalise, that includes composing and arranging and organising, they repeat motifs, colours, patterns, et cetera, in visual art. They exaggerate, and they elaborate, and a fifth operation is to manipulate expectation. And I say these are the elements of the predisposition to 'artify' that occur in this early mother-infant interaction.

And then, later on when humans invented the arts, they were prepared to do these things, to 'artify' or to respond to the artifications of others. Because babies come into the world wanting this kind of behaviour from the adults around them. We don't teach babies to like it, they teach us by their responses, their smiles and their coos and kicks and wriggles and everything, and so we want to keep entertaining them, and our entertainment is these exaggerated kinds of signals.

Robyn Williams: And do you see fathers as being good at artifying in that?

Ellen Dissanayake: Men are included too, of course, because they were babies once too, and you grow up in a culture where people are doing these things in culturally specific ways. But what really holds this to biology, I think, is the fact that early in our evolution as we were becoming bipedal, the female pelvis had to be reshaped, and it was no longer able to give birth to a baby whose head was enlarging. Our species' heads were enlarging at the same time that we were becoming more and more bipedal. So there is what is called an obstetric dilemma at the time of parturition.

So evolution has taken care of some of this. The baby's skull can be compressed with the fontanelle. The mother's pubic symphysis can separate slightly at the time of childbirth. There is a lot of brain growth after the baby is born, much more than any other species. Babies' heads triple in size between birth and four years. And then the baby is born at a much earlier, more premature and helpless state than any other primate or anthropoid baby.

It's an accident that these artistic or ritualised things happen to be the seeds of the arts,

So all of these things together meant that babies were very helpless for a much longer period – two, three years – much longer than any other mammalian species. And so even though mammals are good mothers, I think that the mother-infant interaction that I'm talking about evolved as a behavioural adaptation to this situation.

It's an accident that these artistic or ritualised things happen to behold the seeds of the arts, but the signals that she uses are ritualisations of signals that adults use in everyday ordinary communication with each other. So by doing that she is reinforcing the neural circuits in her brain for feeling fondness and love for her baby because she is exaggerating the brain chemicals, which I've only learned about in the last 10 or so years.

Music has a bonding effect on the people who participate —
the oxytocin that is secreted is a hormone that promotes the feeling of trust and confidence — aka the bonding hormone.

But my intuition that somehow mother-infant interaction held the key or the clue to the ingredients of later arts, then, I think has some support from the fact that oxytocin, it has been found, is secreted in mothers when they are giving birth and when they are lactating but also in close rhythmically coordinated, one might even say synchronised or entrained interaction with other people.

And that has just been found out recently. And so it seems then that that really is a good way to look at the invention of music, then, as having a bonding effect on the people who participate.

The Bonding effect . . .

And by 'music' I mean dance and the movements that go along, clapping and marking time with sticks or with the feet or something like that. That groups of prehistoric individuals who did this together, the oxytocin that is secreted at this time, is a hormone that promotes the feeling of trust and confidence. It has been called the bonding hormone. So I think that makes a good case for that.

In fact it's the arts that make the oxytocin get secreted because
a ritual ceremony is nothing without its arts.