Show notes
Most people can name four pillars of health: diet, exercise, sleep, and stress. Daisy Fancourt, the researcher behind a 146-page World Health Organization report on art and health and the author of Art Cure, argues there is a fifth: the arts. The evidence she lays out is striking. Regular arts engagement is linked to about half the risk of developing depression over ten years, slower biological aging as measured by epigenetic clocks (how fast your cells are aging), and a longer time free from dementia through what researchers call cognitive reserve (the brain's buffer against decline). In studies of surgery patients, recorded music reduced anxiety more effectively than anti-anxiety medication. And yet only 1 in 20 American adults did any art yesterday, compared to 57% who ate vegetables.
Then ceramic artist Jesse Albrecht tests the thesis from the inside. An Army medic in Mosul in the early Iraq War, he came home to a reintegration briefing that amounted to one VHS tape, spent years making dark, angry work about war, and learned the hard way that, in his words, we become what we focus on. A 2020 inpatient PTSD program at a Montana VA hospital turned his life and his work toward recovery and beauty. The episode closes with where to begin, and both guests agree on the answer: you start by starting.
*This episode contains descriptions of war violence and trauma and may not be suitable for children.
00:00 Cold open
00:41 Who is Daisy Fancourt?
02:01 Art is 40,000 years old, maybe older than language
03:34 The WHO report on art and health
05:54 The physical benefits: singing, dance, frailty
07:59 Reading and crafts slow biological aging
08:52 Art as the fifth pillar of health
10:57 Make it or consume it?
12:12 Kids, teens, and granny hobbies
16:35 Art in hospitals: music against medication
19:45 The HIV quilt and singing for lung health
21:34 Cognitive reserve and delaying dementia
22:57 Music and sleep
26:56 Only 1 in 20 adults did any art yesterday
29:34 What counts as art
31:35 The one pound to eleven pounds return
36:22 Who is Jesse Albrecht?
38:33 Mosul: this is bananas
43:59 Coming home to a VHS tape
46:03 Finding other veterans in the art world
50:43 Disillusionment and the dark decade
53:57 Two months at the VA: the 2020 turn
58:02 Is art healing? Jesse pushes back
61:57 How to start: start by starting
64:30 His one big quote about art
66:40 Outro
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