"Engaging With Art May Slow Biological Aging"

This is a fascinating, wonderful article form Designboom about the positive health effects of engaging with the arts. I have suspected this for a long while now...

Scientists now link museums, concerts, and creative hobbies to slower aging
Designboom
May 15,2026

What if visiting museums, attending concerts, singing in a choir, or regularly engaging with creative hobbies did more than improve mood or reduce stress? A new scientific study led by Daisy Fancourt suggests that arts and cultural engagement may also influence the biological pace at which we age.

Published in Innovation in Aging, the new research builds on years of work connecting the arts with physical and mental health outcomes. But while previous studies largely focused on wellbeing, depression, loneliness, or longevity, this latest paper moves into far more microscopic territory: epigenetic ageing, the molecular processes that shape how quickly the body biologically ages over time.

Drawing on data from more than 3,500 adults in the UK Household Longitudinal Study, the researchers found that people who engaged more frequently and more diversely with arts and cultural activities showed signs of slower biological aging across several advanced epigenetic aging clocks. Remarkably, the associations were found to be comparable in magnitude to those linked with physical activity.

from emotional wellbeing to molecular ageing

Over the last decade, Daisy Fancourt’s research has helped establish the growing field of arts and health, demonstrating how cultural participation can affect stress regulation, immune function, mental health, cognitive resilience, and even mortality risk. Her 2026 book Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Transform Our Health argued that the arts should be considered a foundational pillar of wellbeing alongside sleep, diet, exercise, and nature.

This new study by Fancourt together with Lehané Masebo, Saoirse Finn, Hei Wan Mak, and Feifei Bu pushes that argument further. The research investigates whether cultural engagement may be linked to measurable biological aging processes inside the body itself. The study focuses on epigenetic aging, a field of molecular biology that examines how environmental and behavioral factors influence patterns of DNA methylation over time.

Scientists increasingly use so-called epigenetic clocks to estimate biological age, which may differ from chronological age. While someone may be 50 years old chronologically, their biological aging markers could suggest a body aging faster or slower depending on lifestyle, stress exposure, and health behaviors.

The researchers analyzed seven different epigenetic clocks, ranging from earlier models based primarily on chronological age to newer generations designed to measure physiological decline and pace of aging. The strongest associations appeared in newer second- and third-generation clocks, including PhenoAge and DunedinPACE, which are considered more sensitive to health-related behavioral factors.

museums, concerts, choirs, and creative hobbies

The study defines arts and cultural engagement broadly, including visiting museums, galleries, and heritage sites; attending concerts, theater performances, and exhibitions; singing, dancing, painting, photography, and crafts; and participating in libraries, archives, and community cultural spaces.

Researchers evaluated both the frequency and diversity of engagement. Participants who engaged monthly or weekly with cultural activities generally showed slower biological ageing markers than those who participated only once or twice a year.

One of the most striking findings of the paper is that diversity mattered almost as much as frequency. People participating across many different kinds of cultural activities appeared to show stronger associations with slower aging than those engaging in only one or two forms.

The authors suggest this may be because different forms of arts engagement activate multiple systems simultaneously, including cognitive stimulation, emotional processing, sensory immersion, social interaction, creativity, identity formation, and stress reduction.

the comparison with exercise

Perhaps the most consequential aspect of the research is its direct comparison between arts engagement and physical activity. Alongside cultural participation, the study also analyzed exercise habits, including activities such as running, swimming, yoga, cycling, and walking. Both arts engagement and physical activity were associated with slower epigenetic aging, and the effect sizes were found to be broadly comparable across several measures.

The findings do not suggest that museums replace exercise or that attending a concert functions identically to physical training. But they do position arts and cultural participation as a potentially meaningful health behavior in its own right, rather than merely a form of leisure or entertainment.

For decades, exercise, diet, smoking cessation, and sleep have dominated discussions around healthy aging and longevity. The study proposes that cultural participation may deserve consideration within that same framework.

Importantly, the strongest findings appeared among adults over the age of 40, a period increasingly understood as a key threshold in the acceleration of biological aging processes.

a new role for cultural spaces

Beyond the biological findings themselves, the research also carries broader implications for how cities and societies value cultural infrastructure. If museums, libraries, performance venues, choirs, and community arts programs contribute to healthier aging trajectories, cultural access begins to look like part of a preventative health ecosystem. This perspective aligns with a growing movement around social prescribing, where healthcare systems refer patients to community and cultural activities alongside medical treatment. Architecture, urban planning, exhibition design, acoustics, accessibility, and public cultural funding all become intertwined with questions of health and longevity.

The paper remains cautious in its conclusions. The researchers highlight that epigenetic aging science is still evolving and that associations do not prove direct causation. Biological aging clocks themselves remain an emerging and sometimes debated area of research.

Still, the study marks one of the clearest attempts yet to connect arts engagement with measurable molecular aging processes, suggesting that cultural participation may become increasingly important to how societies think about ageing itself. Daisy Fancourt’s research points toward a larger cultural shift, proposing that the arts also help shape the biological conditions through which people age, recover, and remain resilient over time.

project info:

name: Does leisure activity matter for epigenetic ageing? Analyses of arts engagement and physical activity in the UK Household Longitudinal Study

authors: Daisy Fancourt, Lehané Masebo, Saoirse Finn, Hei Wan Mak, and Feifei Bu

journal: Innovation in Aging

publisher: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America

institution: University College London

Original article on Designboom:
https://www.designboom.com/art/scientists-museums-concerts-creative-hobbies-slower-aging-daisy-fancourt/

"From Persona To Mulholland Drive: When Cinema Replaces Narrative With The Logic Of Dreaming" by Thomai Tsimpou

I am a cinephile and have a lifelong interest in the topic of dreams, dreaming, and dream logic so this essay about dream logic in cinema hits me exactly right...

"The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" by Luis Buñuel, 1972

"From Persona To Mulholland Drive: When Cinema Replaces Narrative With The Logic Of Dreaming"

by Thomai Tsimpou for designboom

CINEMA DRIFTING INTO DREAM

Cinema begins to shift when it no longer guarantees that one thing follows another for a reason. Narrative usually secures that relation. It tells us why something happens, what it leads to, who it belongs to. But there is a body of films where this chain loosens, to replace causality with association, recurrence, and displacement. In these films, meaning does not arrive through progression. It accumulates through proximity, stretching the plot until it begins to lose its shape and start resembling a dream state.

Across films by filmmakers such as Luis Buñuel, David Lynch, Ingmar Bergman, and Charlie Kaufman, this shift appears gradually, in the way scenes return without consequence, identities hesitate or overlap and reality becomes something that can no longer be clearly located.

"Mulholland Drive" by David Lynch, 2001

BUÑUEL’S CIRCULAR TIME MEETS LYNCH’S UNSTABLE REALITIES

What changes first is time. Not in the obvious sense of flashbacks or jumps, but more subtly, in the way scenes relate to each other. A moment returns, but slightly altered, as if it had been remembered rather than repeated. The difference is small, but it cancels certainty. If the same event can occur twice without acknowledgment, then time is no longer moving forward. It is circulating. This is where Buñuel’s logic sets in: repetition without consequence. A situation restarts, but nothing has been learned or carried over. Cause and effect are not broken, they are simply no longer required.

But repetition does not behave the same way across these films. In Lynch, it produces instability. A scene feels familiar because it exists in more than one version at once. Identity follows the same pattern. A character does not change into someone else, they seem to occupy multiple positions simultaneously. The effect is not transformation, but overlap. The viewer is left holding two incompatible realities that do not resolve into one.

"The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" by Luis Buñuel, 1972

FROM BERGMAN’S DISSOLVING SELVES TO KAUFMAN’S RECURSIVE LOOPS

Bergman pushes this further by reducing the space in which identity can exist. When the frame tightens around the face, when silence stretches and language begins to fail, the boundary between one person and another starts to erode. In Persona, this happens through proximity. Two figures begin to mirror each other so precisely that distinction becomes difficult to maintain. The image fuses and identity is compressed until it becomes unstable.

Kaufman takes the same instability and turns it inward. Instead of overlapping realities, he constructs recursive ones. Memory, imagination, and present experience fold into each other. A scene may be remembered, invented, or happening, but these states are indistinguishable because they are structured the same way. What’s different is the level at which the image is being experienced.

"Persona" by Ingmar Bergman, 1966 - Image: MUBI

ATMOSPHERE REPLACES CERTAINTY AS IMAGES REFUSE TO SETTLE

Across all of this, the boundary between reality and imagination becomes less useful. Not because films deliberately confuse the two, but because they refuse to mark the difference. As Susan Sontag observes in relation to Bergman, visions appear with the same weight and texture as anything ‘real.’ There is no visual cue that instructs the viewer how to read an image. Cinema does not shift into a dream. It was already operating there.

What holds these structures together is atmosphere. Sound plays a decisive role. A low hum continues across cuts, ignoring spatial logic. Silence expands until it feels like pressure rather than absence. Music enters without emotional justification, interrupting rather than guiding.

Spaces are composed with a precision that feels slightly excessive, producing environments that are both controlled and unreliable. A room appears stable, but its symmetry becomes oppressive. A face is held in close-up long enough to lose familiarity. Light isolates instead of revealing. These are not expressive choices in the usual sense. They are ways of reorganizing perception, of making the viewer aware that what they are seeing cannot fully settle into meaning.

"Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me" by David Lynch, 1992

WHEN FILMS STOP RESOLVING AND BEGIN TO HOLD TENSION

What these filmmakers share is not a style, but their refusal to resolve time into sequence, identity into unity, or reality into a stable category, constructing films that operate through the same logic as dreaming, where images are connected by intensity, memory, and association, resulting in a different kind of viewing, that no longer questions ‘what is happening,’ but ‘how is this holding together at all.’ And the answer is, not through coherence, but through persistence. Images remain, return, and interfere with one another. Meaning never fully arrives. Cinema produces an unstable reality, and then leaves the viewer inside it, without the tools that would normally allow them to exit.

"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" by Michel Gondry, 2004 - Image: Focus Features

"The Seventh Seal" by Ingmar Bergman, 1957

"Mulholland Drive" by David Lynch, 2001

"Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me" by David Lynch, 1992

"Mulholland Drive" by David Lynch, 2001

"Persona" by Ingmar Bergman, 1966 - Image: Louis Huch © AB Svensk Filmindustri

"Rabbits" by David Lynch, 2002

Link to original article:
https://www.designboom.com/art/persona-mulholland-drive-cinema-narrative-logic-dreaming-bunuel-lynch-bergman-kaufman/