How art and music can build a better brain

Plus: Long-term strategies to fight allergies

View this email online April 9, 2023 by Andrea Muraskin This week: A new book makes the case for how making art can improve brain function, (even when it comes to understanding science)! Plus, with nature in bloom, exposure therapies offer a way to get the seasonal allergy monkey off your back. And, a philosophy professor opens offers a more helpful way to talk about suicide.  Building a better brain through music, dance and poetry DrAfter123/Getty Images When Flor Delgadillo was four years old, she had a seizure, and a doctor diagnosed her with epilepsy. Around the same time she started taking ballet lessons. She and her parents didn’t tell the dance school about her diagnosis, for fear that she would be restricted in what she was allowed to do. A few years later, she took up painting. “I think that dance and painting were very therapeutic,” she says. Delgadillo has never stopped dancing and making art, and she’s never had another seizure.  Today, Delgadillo is a multidisciplinary artist and advocate for accessibility in the arts. In her 2022 installation “Morphology” she projected EEG readings from her own brain on gallery walls, captured using a futuristic looking “brain sensing crown” that she made with 3D printing technology.  A growing number of studies support the idea that engaging with the arts at an early age may have a measurable effect on the brain. When we make art, we increase the brain's plasticity — its ability to adapt to new experiences, says Susan Magsamen, a neuroscientist and co-author of the new bestseller Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us. "Children that are playing music, their brain structure actually changes and their cerebral cortex actually gets larger," Magsamen says. The book describes how a person's neural circuitry changes in response to activities like learning a new song or a new dance step, or how to play a character onstage. "Students with access to art education are five times less likely to drop out of school and four times more likely to be recognized with high achievement,” notes Magsamen’s co-author Ivy Ross, who is vice president of hardware design at Google.  While children’s developing brains are especially plastic, adults can also benefit. For example, in one study, scientists used fMRI machines to show that professional musicians had greater plasticity than nonmusicians in the hippocampus, an area involved in storing and retrieving information. Learn more about how “we’re all wired for art.”  Making art is good for your health. Here's how to start a habit . Newsletter continues after sponsor message More pollen, more allergies: Exposure therapy in several forms treats symptoms Drew Angerer/Getty Images The beauty of spring has a nasty side for millions of Americans with seasonal allergies, as plants offer up their blooms, and their pollen. And warm winters, like the one we just had in the Eastern U.S., prompt some plants to produce more pollen, making things worse for allergy sufferers. The standard MO is to dose yourself with nasal steroid sprays and/or antihistamine pills to try to soothe those runny noses and itchy eyes.  When it comes to long-term solutions, allergy shots have been around for a while and they’re effective – but many people lack the patience or resources to commit to months or years of weekly shots.  But now there’s a serum available that patients can take at home, which works like the shots but is much more convenient. Like allergy shots, the serum is a form of exposure therapy, or allergy immunotherapy. Patients are exposed to very small amounts of the specific things they're allergic to with the goal of training the immune system to tolerate them, gradually, over time. The serums can be formulated for each person’s specific allergies. And if you have indoor allergies, some doctors have formulas for cats and dust mites too. You can also get prescription tablets, sold for single allergies.  In addition to your allergies and your doctor, your insurance coverage and your budget are also worth considering, since immunotherapy serums are not always covered. Here’s what you should know before trying exposure therapy for allergies.  Plus: the science behind worsening seasonal allergies A survivor of suicide attempts explains 'How Not to Kill Yourself' Lauren Schrader/Pantheon Books If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. In Joni Mitchell’s “Song for Sharon” there’s a verse about a woman the singer knew who had just killed herself. Mitchell wrote about the reaction to the suicide among her social circle: Friends were calling up all day yesterday/ All emotions and abstractions/ It seems we all live so close to that line and so far from satisfaction.  The words “we all” stay with me. Contemplating suicide can feel excruciatingly lonely. But as philosophy professor and author Clancy Martin explains, it’s also extremely common. When he tells his students he’s attempted to end his life and asks if any of them had ever thought about suicide, he says “it's rare that 90% of the class doesn't raise their hands.” Martin has survived more than 10 suicide attempts, and he says he’s grateful he never succeeded. He hopes his new memoir – How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind – will help destigmatize suicidality, and thereby make the urge less powerful. “When you're in a room full of people and you realize, oh my gosh, all my friends, all these people around me, they also have thought about taking their own lives. Suddenly it's like, 'Oh, that's just something I'm thinking. It's not something I have to do. It's not something I have to act on and I don't have to feel bad about it,’” Martin says.  Martin spoke to NPR’s Fresh Air about tools for coping with suicidal thoughts, from existentialist philosophy, to letting go of binary thinking (right vs. wrong, hope vs. hopelessness) to texting 988 – the national mental health crisis hotline. Here are Martin’s biggest takeaways for people who struggle with suicidal thoughts, and their loved ones.  Also: Reach out and listen: How to help someone at risk of suicide Before you go: Cormeshia Batty 'You forget to eat': How Ozempic went from diabetes medicine to blockbuster diet drug Record enrollment + smaller networks makes finding doctors challenging for people on ACA health plans Clash over state line pot shops in Oregon adds fuel to "Greater Idaho" secession movement Recovery high schools help kids heal from addictions and build a future We hope you enjoyed these stories. Find more of NPR's health journalism on Shots and follow us on Twitter at @NPRHealth. All best, Andrea Muraskin and your Shots editors Listen to your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to hear live radio from WUFT 89.1 (edit station). What do you think of today's email? We'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: shots@npr.org Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here. 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